THE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. -Ecclesiastes If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) - as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.*1 Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself. In fact, even inverted, Borges's fable is unusable. Only the allegory of the Empire, perhaps, remains. Because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction. Because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This imaginary of representation, which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographers mad project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory, disappears in the simulation whose operation is nuclear and genetic, no longer at all specular or discursive. It is all of metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control - and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their

it is simply masked. that no longer even gives the event of death a chance." This (which dates from 1865) in order to safeguard the principle of a truth at all costs and to escape the interrogation posed by simulation . Now. with the duplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer either true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the duplication of the discourse of the unconscious in the discourse of simulation that can never again be unmasked." the "real" and the "imaginary.artificial resurrection in the systems of signs. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). For if any symptom can be "produced. and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary. the other an absence. perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes.but why would simulation be at the gates of the unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same way as any old symptom of classical medicine? Dreams already are. metastable. leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences. a material more malleable than meaning. on either side of health. since it is not false either?*2 What can the army do about simulators? Traditionally it unmasks them and punishes
. Therefore. then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated. As to psychoanalysis. Certainly." Is the simulator sick or not. Psychology and medicine stop at this point." and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious manner at the borders of the principle of illness. nor even parody. what can medicine do with what floats on either side of illness. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself such is the vital function of the model in a system of death. whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false. to all combinatory algebra. in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences. pretending. given that he produces "true" symptoms? Objectively one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill. to all binary oppositions. the psychiatrist purports that "for every form of mental alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms of which the simulator is ignorant and in the absence of which the psychiatrist would not be deceived. objective cause have ceased to exist. or rather of anticipated resurrection. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary. nor duplication. that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double. leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear. and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "real" illnesses according to their objective causes. a programmatic. it transfers the symptom of the organic order to the unconscious order: the latter is new and taken for "real" more real than the other . or dissimulating. THE DIVINE IRREFERENCE OF IMAGES To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. forestalled by the illness's henceforth undiscoverable truth. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real. It is no longer a question of imitation. reference. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have.the knowledge that truth. One implies a presence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill.

one can say that the icon worshipers were the most modern minds. according to a clear principle of identification. but that it was therein the great game lay . all crazy people simulate. whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. because. This way the stake will always have been the murderous power of images. they were already enacting his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which. between the "produced" and the authentic symptom. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all. the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man. and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion.from this came their urge to destroy the images.knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images. It is against this lack of distinction that classical reason armed itself in all its categories. it's because he is. even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum ." Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense. Even military psychology draws back from Cartesian certainties and hesitates to make the distinction between true and false. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. and that these images were in essence not images. On the other hand. and the destructive. a heart patient.them. or a madman. such as an original model would have made them." Indeed it can be. alone. they already knew no longer represented anything. "If he is this good at acting crazy. deploy their power and pomp of fascination . If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God. there would have been no reason to destroy them. that they were purely a game. the question returns to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "I forbade that there be any simulacra in the temples because the divinity that animates nature can never be represented. since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them). in the guise of having God become apparent in the mirror of images. which now only serves as an alibi for a strategy altogether free of influences and signs. who founded their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power . annihilating truth that they allow to appear . Today it can discharge a very good simulator as exactly equivalent to a "real" homosexual. Beyond medicine and the army favored terrains of simulation. submerging the principle of truth. whom one accuses of disdaining and negating images. Thus this death of the divine referential must be exorcised at all costs. perhaps. This was the approach of the Jesuits. were those who accorded them their true value.the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts. One can see that the iconoclasts. when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that. in contrast to the iconolaters who only saw reflections in them and were content to venerate a filigree God. the most adventurous. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons.*3 This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra.the end of transcendence.that deep down God never existed. Behind the baroqueness of images hides the éminence grise of politics. that only the simulacrum ever existed. but perfect simulacra. murderers of
. forever radiant with their own fascination. But it is what today again outflanks them.

of lived experience.not unreal. Simulation. no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true. In the first case. nostalgia assumes its full meaning. In the fourth. of the neoreal and the hyperreal that everywhere is the double of a strategy of deterrence.God of course.it is of the order of sorcery. the image is a good appearance . it has no relation to any reality whatsoever. in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own. The second inaugurates the era of simulacra and of simulation. of secondary objectivity.it is of the order of maleficence. in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence. it masks the absence of a profound reality. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality . but of simulation. Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is Utopian. In the third.representation is of the sacramental order. Such is simulation. and authenticity. parallel to and greater than the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us .a strategy of the real. The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation. resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared.a plethora of truth. that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless. All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning. from the radical negation of the sign as value. that is to say never exchanged for the real. but exchanged for itself. it is a fundamental axiom). as the Byzantine icons could be those of divine identity. But what if God himself can be simulated. Escalation of the true. on the contrary. it is an evil appearance .the real. that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange . The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point. it is its own pure simulacrum. simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum . Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality. it masks and denatures a profound reality. insofar as it is opposed to representation. When the real is no longer what it was. murderers of their own model. To this murderous power is opposed that of representations as a dialectical power. it is no longer of the order of appearances. the visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. it plays at being an appearance .
. Panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential. In the second. as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance. but a simulacrum. the real from its artificial resurrection. from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference.

RAMSES. This model thus grants itself the luxury to incarnate itself beyond itself in the "brute" reality of these Indians it has entirely reinvented .it attains its pure form. customs fossilized alive as in a snapshot. be applied to all living things and make itself invisible. Castaneda. OR THE ROSY-COLORED RESURRECTION Ethnology brushed up against its paradoxical death in 1971. The museum. No one can touch them anymore: as in a mine the vein is closed down. it is always murderous). will provide a perfect alibi. but intact in its "virginity. Indians who have again become what they were . In order for ethnology to live. and. cryogenized. the object takes its revenge for being "discovered" and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it. out of the reach of colonizers. lost to science. will today. entire working-class neighborhoods. like mummies in the open air. living metallurgic zones. Here begins an antiethnology that will never end and to which Jaulin. the logical evolution of a science is to distance itself increasingly from its object. women. to their primitive state. We are all Tasadays. until it dispenses with it entirely: its autonomy is only rendered even more fantastic . instead of being circumscribed as a geometric site. at the level of the "open" museum where one museumified in situ. In any case. Thus ethnology. This at the suggestion of the anthropologists themselves. who were seeing the indigenous people disintegrate immediately upon contact." It is not a question of sacrifice (science never sacrifices itself. they have become referential simulacra. an entire culture. and by the pitiless reversal that the dead object exerts on it? Like Orpheus. men. It is against this hell of the paradox that the ethnologists wished to protect themselves by cordoning off the Tasaday with virgin forest. what a triumph for this science that seemed dedicated to their destruction! Of course. Science loses precious capital there. that of the simulacrum.simulacral Indians who at last proclaim
. Clastres are various witnesses. in the glass coffin of the virgin forest. by dying. and ethnologists. and science itself has become pure simulation. but of the simulated sacrifice of its object in order to save its reality principle. like Eurydice. languages. the day when the Philippine government decided to return the few dozen Tasaday who had just been discovered in the depths of the jungle. it always turns around too soon. like an omnipresent fourth dimension. frozen in their natural element. The Tasaday. its object falls back into Hades. Doesn't all science live on this paradoxical slope to which it is doomed by the evanescence of its object in its very apprehension. sterilized. like a dimension of life. tourists. protected to death.Savages who are indebted to ethnology for still being Savages: what a turn of events. liberated from its object. an eternal guarantee. these savages are posthumous: frozen. is everywhere now. but the object will be safe. The Indian thus returned to the ghetto. rather than circumscribing itself as an objective science. again becomes the model of simulation of all the possible Indians from before ethnology. where they had lived for eight centuries without any contact with the rest of the species.gestures. as "historical" witnesses of their period. and children included . its object must die. The same holds true at Cruesot.

and then one visits the reconstituted whole). one forbade visitors to enter the Lascaux caves. in the White community. to conceal that it is this world. It is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is itself stamped in the minds of future generations. in a world of simulation. but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication suffices to render both artificial.it is here. To this end the pharaohs must be brought out of their tomb and the mummies out of their silence. The confinement of the scientific object is equal to the confinement of the mad and the dead. diffracted. historical retrospection . which has again become savage in its way. To
. but it is the objects that invest it with depth." The form produced by confinement is followed by an innumerable. and of the resurrection of differences. of the blackmail of the real.the universal truth of ethnology. everywhere. that is to say. in a world completely cataloged and analyzed. but an exact replica was constructed five hundred meters from it. It is science that masters the objects. noblesse oblige. The West is seized with panic at the thought of not being able to save what the symbolic order had been able to conserve for forty centuries. Ramses does not signify anything for us. under the sign of dead differences. We have all become living specimens in the spectral light of ethnology. as in Castaneda. or of antiethnology. Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view. gives speech back to the insane. only the mummy is of an inestimable worth because it is what guarantees that accumulation has meaning. it survives in an antiethnology whose task it is to reinject the difference fiction. In the same way. which is devastated by difference and by death. so that everyone could see them (one glances through a peephole at the authentic cave. etc. which only gives a dead and circular response to a dead and circular interrogation. with the pretext of saving the original. but out of sight and far from the light of day. In the same way science and technology were recently mobilized to save the mummy of Ramses II. which is nothing but the pure form of triumphal ethnology. the secret that kills it (and which the Savages knew better than it did): the vengeance of the dead. science can't help but die contaminated by the death of this object that is its inverse mirror. etc. then artificially resurrected under the auspices of the real.) nor when science seems to break the mirror of its objectivity (effacing itself before its object. were the first victims. It is thus very naive to look for ethnology in the Savages or in some Third World . slowed-down mechanism. And just as all of society is irremediably contaminated by this mirror of madness that it has held up to itself. Nothing changes when society breaks the mirror of madness (abolishes the asylums. ours. according to an unconscious reversion. of the murder of every symbolic form and of its hysterical. in the metropolises. But in the same breath ethnology grants us its only and final lesson. the Savage fiction everywhere. of the hallucination of truth. As ethnology collapses in its classical institution.) and to bend down before the "differences. after it was left to rot for several dozen years in the depths of a museum. but that for a long time has extended to all Western societies.a murder of which the Savages.

if the exportation of the cornices was in effect an arbitrary act. to an order of history. And just as with ethnology. One effaces everything and starts over.this end they must be exhumed and given military honors. Thus it would have been enough to exhume Ramses to ensure his extermination by museumification. Only absolute secrecy assured them this millennial power . Americans flatter themselves for having brought the population of Indians back to pre-Conquest levels. hatred of a whole civilization for its own foundation. which at least fooled no one. master over putrefaction and death. whereas embalming was a mythical effort that strove to immortalize a hidden dimension. which plays at extricating itself from its object to better secure itself in its pure form. at the beginning of colonization. Witness the cloister of Saint-Michel de Cuxa. a visible myth of origin. our order. They are prey to both science and worms. We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians. science. In general. Because finally we have never believed in them. and museums. of an order that would have had nothing to do with it. In the same way. the violence of a civilization without secrets." And everyone is supposed to applaud this restitution (as they did "the experimental campaign to take back the sidewalks" on the Champs Elysees!). Thus. They even
. those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ. We only know how to place our science in service of repairing the mummy. There were two possible responses: either admit that this Law was not universal. there was a moment of stupor and bewilderment before the very possibility of escaping the universal law of the Gospel. which one will repatriate at great cost from the Cloisters in New York to reinstall it in "its original site. which reassures us about our end. a visible continuum. behind this defunct power that it tries to annex. and it dreams of it because it exterminated it by exhuming it as its own past. that is to say restoring a visible order. demuseumification is nothing but another spiral in artificiality. or exterminate the Indians to efface the evidence. But mostly because our culture dreams. if the Cloisters in New York are an artificial mosaic of all cultures (following a logic of the capitalist centralization of value). Why? Because Ramses was a great despotic and military figure? Certainly. which only knows how to condemn what preceded it to decay and death and subsequently to try to revive it with science. Repatriating it is nothing but a supplementary subterfuge. which would suffice to slowly exterminate them. or even simply discovering them.the mastery over putrefaction that signified the mastery of the complete cycle of exchanges with death. The cloister should have stayed in New York in its simulated environment. Irreparable violence toward all secrets. which no longer masters anything. their reimportation to the original site is even more artificial: it is a total simulacrum that links up with "reality" through a complete circumvolution. Because mummies don't rot from worms: they die from being transplanted from a slow order of the symbolic. We require a visible past. one contented oneself with converting them. acting as if nothing had happened and indulging in retrospective hallucination. Well. Whence this historic scene of the reception of the mummy at the Orly airport.

) Everywhere we live in a universe strangely similar to the original . their demographic "promotion" is just another step toward symbolic extermination.they are already purged of their death. it is a deterrence machine set up in
. play of space]): digest of the American way of life. It is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms: the Pirates. rather: inside. The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false. jeux d'espace [Utopias. Embalmed and pacified. In this way. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. This imaginary world is supposed to ensure the success of the operation. The only phantasmagoria in this imaginary world lies in the tenderness and warmth of the crowd. for exceeding the original number. (With sinister derision. idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. and better than when they were alive. This is presented as proof of the superiority of civilization: it will produce more Indians than they themselves were able to do. a whole panoply of gadgets magnetizes the crowd in directed flows outside. one is altogether abandoned at the exit. By an extraordinary coincidence (but this derives without a doubt from the enchantment inherent to this universe). like all tribal culture. etc. is drawn. Marin did it very well in Utopiques. more cheerful. the religious. Certainly. everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America. down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd. the Frontier. like the faces in funeral homes.flatter themselves for doing better. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real. as it did traditionally. But this doubling does not signify. miniaturized pleasure of real America. in the light of their model. as can be seen in Ishi's case. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot . this overproduction is again a means of destroying them: for Indian culture. Or.things are doubled by their own scenario. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real. of its constraints and joys. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. in its banal omnipresence. solitude is directed at a single gadget: the automobile. whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real. and in the sufficient and excessive number of gadgets necessary to create the multitudinous effect. the Future World. who awaits his resurrection through an increase of 180 degrees centigrade. the imminence of their death . One parks outside and stands in line inside. but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.a veritable concentration camp . and thus of saving the reality principle. Thus.is total. panegyric of American values. But what attracts the crowds the most is without a doubt the social microcosm. more authentic. all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety. rests on the limitation of the group and the refusal of any "unlimited" increase. THE HYPERREAL AND THE IMAGINARY Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra. that is carceral). childlike world is found to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized: Walt Disney. this frozen.

as much as cinema studios. a sinking reality principle. heaven. or lost bodies. a mental implosion and involution without precedent lies in wait for a system of this kind. One reinvents penury. unreal circulation . Disneyland: a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are elsewhere. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties. health food.that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness. its infantile degeneration. Whence the debility of this imaginary. to the improbable luxurious materialization of life and to undiscoverable contradictions. Disneyland is the prototype of this new function. They no longer touch each other. POLITICAL INCANTATION Watergate. But all the sexual. belong to the same order. somatic recycling institutes. yoga. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere. but they go jogging.in this sense it was a
. or the lost taste for food. which is no longer anything but an immense scenario and a perpetual pan shot. Nevertheless.a city of incredible proportions but without space. of energy crises and the critique of capital. which proliferate in California. but there are institutes for that. or the incredible coexistence of the most bizarre theories and practices. in the sophisticated confines of a triumphal market economy is reinvented a penury/sign. adds a final esoteric aureole to the triumph of an esoteric culture. On a mental level. this city. Same operation. in the "real" world. Marine World: Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations that feed reality. etc. whose visible signs would be those of this strange obesity. maybe a mental catastrophe. And Watergate in particular succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal . The denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law. tending to regenerate through scandal a moral and political principle. and even here. and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere . Magic Mountain. People no longer look at each other. Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village. vanished savage naturalness: natural food. which correspond to the improbable coalition of luxury. and money. the phantasms. legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product. asceticism. needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms. is verified. Marshall Sahlins's idea that it is the economy of the market. but at a secondary level: here. a penury/simulacrum. and not of nature at all. Everywhere today one must recycle waste. the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization. but there is contactotherapy. the energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant. that secretes penury. a simulated behavior of the underdeveloped (including the adoption of Marxist tenets) that. or lost sociality. through the imaginary. As much as electrical and atomic power stations. The same scenario as in Disneyland (effect of the imaginary concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the limits of the artificial perimeter): here the scandal effect hiding that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods on the part of the CIA and of the Washington Post journalists). however. They no longer walk. psychic. fairylike. the historical.order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. without dimension. in the guise of ecology. and the dreams.

today one works to conceal that there is none. nothing more. Because these are the same. from the theories of the Enlightenment up to Communism.a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.it is a monstrous unprincipled enterprise. and it must be responded to as such. in fact. A large dose of political morality reinjected on a world scale. denunciation. it is a challenge to society. no need for revolution: it suffices that capital accommodate itself to the rational formula of exchange). capital exploits us. immoral and without scruples. its incomprehensible ferocity." understood as follows: capital. he takes the "relation of force" for the truth of capitalist domination. Capital. But this would be nothing but the formula of ideology. because it is what everyone is busy concealing. etc. this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality.) works spontaneously for the order of capital. All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality.as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules.he is thus in the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists are.SPIRALING NEGATIVETY Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries . And all the recrimination that replaces revolutionary thought today comes back to incriminate capital for not following the rules of the game. Watergate is not a scandal. and he himself denounces this relation of force as scandal . well beyond all the relations of force.that is what is scandalous. which can be thought of in another way: formerly one worked to dissimulate scandal . of a moral panic as one approaches the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty. etc. an order of truth in which the veritable symbolic violence of the social order is engendered. but it doesn't give a damn . One could say along with Bourdieu: "The essence of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such and to acquire all its force only because it dissimulates itself as such." . was never linked by a contract to the society that it dominates. and when Bourdieu states it. comply with this phantasmagoria of the social contract and fulfill its obligations to the whole of society (by the same token.prodigious operation of intoxication. to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. but a challenge to take up according to symbolic law. MÖBIUS . its justice is a class justice. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral or economic rationality. It is the Left that holds out the mirror of equivalence to capital hoping that it will comply. One imputes this thinking to the contract of capital. It is "enlightened" thought that seeks to control it by imposing rules on it. which are only its shifting and indifferent configuration in the moral and political consciences of men. This is what the journalists of the Washington Post did. unacceptable to the system of moral and economic equivalence that is the axiom of leftist thought. In the film. He does the same work of purging and reviving moral order. and whoever revives this public morality (through indignation. its fundamental immorality . this is embodied by the character
. It is a sorcery of social relations. this is what must be said at all costs. can only function behind a moral superstructure. "Power is unjust.

no more dialectical polarity. they will never exercise it except by proxy. conventional field of perspective in which the premises and the consequences of an act or of an event can be calculated. It is through the simulation of a narrow. constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event. genuine power no longer exists. in which there is no longer either an active or a passive. since the Communists. which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. or again. The facts no longer have a specific trajectory. will change nothing of its fundamental capitalist mechanism.or do they no longer want it. am not afraid to see the Communists take power in Italy which may seem self-evident. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model.of "Deep Throat. they are born at the intersection of models. of doing the work of the Right. -: but further: I. that a political credibility can be maintained (and of course "objective" analysis. in a field unhinged by simulation. every act is terminated at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and having been scattered in all directions. That is. etc.and why not? All hypotheses are possible. It is through the arbitrary cessation of this spiraling causality that a principle of political reality can be saved. it would be naive to see an embittered good conscience at work here. and spontaneously. power. if they come to power. The Communists attack the Socialist Party as if they wished to shatter the union of the Left. orbital like that of the bomb. by definition? When Berlinguer declares: "There is no need to be afraid to see the Communists take power in Italy. and thus there is no risk whoever seizes power or seizes it again. -: that in fact.the models come first.all true. even the most contradictory . is it a police-inspired scenario and a form of blackmail to public security? All of this is simultaneously true. or extreme-right provocation. or unfavorable to them within the Union of the Left . manipulating the left-wing journalists in order to get rid of Nixon . the struggle. or a centrist mise-en-scène to discredit all extreme terrorists and to shore up its own failing power. Besides. Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists. indeed the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation. This anticipation. no more negative electricity. because
. their circulation. In fact. this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning. in the image of the models from which they derive. all determination evaporates. and the search for proof. it is because they no longer want power.). a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once. implosion of antagonistic poles). Berlinguer. of all the models based on the merest fact . this precession." who was said to be the eminence grise of the Republicans. we are in a logic of simulation. Because manipulation is a wavering causality in which positivity and negativity are engendered and overlap. in the sense that their truth is to be exchanged. this short circuit. They give credence to the idea that these resistances would come from a more radical political need. in a generalized cycle." it simultaneously signifies: -: that there is no need to be afraid. but not as much as you might think. If one envisions the entire cycle of any act or event in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist. is what allows each time for all possible interpretations. -: that there is no risk that they will ever come to power (because they don't want to) and even if they occupy the seat of power. one unfavorable to the Left in general. But do they not want power at this juncture. but this one is superfluous: the Left itself does a perfectly good job.

circularized. Who will unravel this imbroglio? The Gordian knot can at least be cut." to desire its own repression and to invest in paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion that returns this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other. and as if involuntarily. which. All of this is simultaneously true. but that conveys the impossibility of a determined position of power. a "vicious" curvature of a political space that is henceforth magnetized. proving work through striking. but of the subtle.-: it could mean the opposite (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am afraid to see the Communists take power (and there are good reasons for that. like Watergate. the historical revolution. Formerly the discourse on history derived its power from violently opposing itself to that of nature. as it is elsewhere (the Tasaday) of proving ethnology through the dispossession of its object . the impossibility of a determined discursive position. before thinking that we now take pleasure in capital. an enigmatic reversal that brings desire "revolutionary in itself. the discourse of desire to that of power . maleficent. today both are dissolved in the same type of demand. Möbian compulsion. proving the system through crisis. phantasm. Hell of simulation. of desire and capital. and capital through revolution. proving truth through scandal. It is always a question of proving the real through the imaginary. even for a Communist). try to regenerate a moribund principle through simulated scandal. the whole system. reversibilized from the right to the left. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to. which is no longer one of torture. and murder . All the referentials combine their discourses in a circular. as political discourses can be. It would take too long to traverse the entire range of the operational negativity of all those scenarios of deterrence. sex and work were fiercely opposed terms. And this logic is neither that of one party nor of another. when such collusions admirably knot themselves together without the knowledge of their authors? Conjunction of the system and of its extreme alternative like the two sides of a curved mirror.today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios. if one divides it. wanting what it wants. It is the secret of a discourse that is no longer simply ambiguous. the final pleasure as the metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so widely the order of the day): only capital takes pleasure. results in a supplementary spiral without the reversibility of surfaces being resolved (here the reversible continuity of hypotheses). proving the law through transgression. The Möbius strip. Conjunction of desire and the law. a torsion that is like that of the evil spirit of commutation. Not so long ago. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze.a sort of hormonal treatment through negativity and crisis. which seizes the occasion to regenerate its own flagging humanism and whose indignant protest in turn consolidates Franco's regime by uniting the Spanish masses against this foreign intervention? Where is the truth of all that. elusive twisting of meaning*4 where even the condemned at Burgos are still a gift from Franco to Western democracy. the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface: transfinite? And is it not the same for desire and the libidinal space? Conjunction of desire and value.without taking into account:
. said Lyotard.

that is posed here. THE STRATEGY OF THE REAL The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. But the difficulty is proportional to the danger. of hypersimulation or offensive simulation. whereas the former attacks the reality principle itself. to escape their real death throes. You won't be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will
. only had the right to phantom attempts. in order to preserve the blessing of power. the signs do not lean to one side or another. the right to property. Organize a fake holdup.alibi of every power.in short. in order to attempt. so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the criminal). to simulated murders. But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form. Illusion is no longer possible. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy.the proof of theater through antitheater. the king (also the god) had to die. the proof of psychiatry through antipsychiatry. negativity. Demand a ransom. Ford. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that. Because the latter does nothing but disturb the order of things." in order to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and of its fundamental nonexistence. The others. Formerly. of its already seen and of its already dead. he is miserably forced to feign death. above and beyond its object. To seek new blood in its own death. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Simulate a robbery in a large store: how to persuade security that it is a simulated robbery? There is no "objective" difference: the gestures. because the real is no longer possible. Such was the case with some American presidents: the Kennedys were murdered because they still had a political dimension. Johnson. remain close to the "truth. all the institutions speak of themselves through denial. the proof of art through antiart. and antipower: this is the only solution . Today. law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation. by simulating death. Nixon. It is the whole political problem of parody. and take the most trustworthy hostage. But it is lost. therein lay his power. To the established order they are always of the order of the real. Transgression and violence are less serious because they only contest the distribution of the real. to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis. etc. For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated holdup than to a real holdup. the signs are the same as for a real robbery. and make it so that the operation creates as much commotion as possible . the proof of pedagogy through antipedagogy. Verify that your weapons are harmless. All the powers.

because it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based. it is there that we must aim at order.that is. as such it is as serious as the simulation of crime. whereas simulation is of the third order. one will actually pay you the phony ransom). etc. where they function as a group of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs. of the gravity of
. beyond true and false. will either be punished less severely (because it has no "consequences") or punished as an offense against the judicial system (for example if one sets in motion a police operation "for nothing") . because if it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation. through the force of inertia of the real that surrounds us. How can the simulation of virtue be punished? However. etc. When in doubt. a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack. crises. anticipated in their presentation and their possible consequences. airplane hijackings. if it is established as such. and no longer at all to their "real" end. because it cannot function anywhere else. On the contrary. power itself ends by being dismantled in this space and becoming a simulation of power (disconnected from its ends and its objectives. It is necessary to see in this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation the weight of an order that cannot see and conceive of anything but the real. it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real. a determined power that can only reign over a determined world. Thus. in short. But this becomes more and more difficult.*5 it is in this sense that they cannot be controlled by an order that can only exert itself on the real and the rational. In short. but that cannot do anything against this indefinite recurrence of simulation. and hence no repression either. and dedicated to the effects of power and mass simulation). Parody renders submission and transgression equivalent. against this nebula whose weight no longer obeys the laws of gravitation of the real.but never as simulation since it is precisely as such that no equivalence with the real is possible. lacking the real. or to prove the real.really fire on sight. on causes and ends. But this does not make them harmless. a referential order that can only reign over the referential. are now in some sense simulation holdups in that they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media. without wishing it. the opposite is also true (and this reversibility itself is part of the apparatus of simulation and the impotence of power): namely. The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power. one of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation. it is as hyperreal events. beyond rational distinctions upon which the whole of the social and power depend. demonstrations. This is how all the holdups. it always prefers this hypothesis (as in the army one prefers to take the simulator for a real madman). and that is the most serious crime. to reduce everything to the real . This is certainly why order always opts for the real. its only strategy against this defection. The simulation of an offense. but indefinitely refracted by each other (just like so-called historical events: strikes. you will immediately find yourself once again.). is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere. no longer with a specific content or end. to persuade us of the reality of the social. because the law is a simulacrum of the second order. in the real. The only weapon of power. to the established order itself. well before institutions and justice come into play. beyond equivalences. The established order can do nothing against it.

all real equivalence of production and wealth. Well.the economy and the finalities of production. plays at crisis. that of values and commodities. Because in the end. good and evil. obsession with its survival. everyone unloads it on everyone else) and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. Whence the characteristic hysteria of our times: that of the production and reproduction of the real. the iron law of its power. it was also the first to liquidate it by exterminating all use value. etc. Today when the danger comes at it from simulation (that of being dissolved in the play of signs). What every society looks for in continuing to produce. Thus everywhere the hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself. One remains among principles. today it is this same logic that is even more set against capital. The other production. and if it is the one that fostered reality. social. why not? that of desire. power played at deterrence and simulation. The whole world adheres to it more or less in terror of the collapse of the political. that of the belle epoque of political economy. disintegrating all the contradictions by dint of producing equivalent signs. but it is no longer anything but its scaled-down refraction (thus hyper-realists fix a real from which all meaning and charm. all depth and energy of representation have vanished in a hallucinatory resemblance). has for a long time had no specific meaning. is to restore the real that escapes it. When it has totally disappeared.. "Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power since in a nonreferential world. But it is too late. To this end it prefers the discourse of crisis. Capital was the first to play at deterrence. For power. power plays at the real. in the very sense we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. As long as the historical threat came at it from the real. that shattered every ideal distinction between true and false. in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange. on which to establish a last glimmer of power. but also. and political stakes. of every human objective. even the confusion of the reality principle and the principle of desire is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality. it is a question of life and death. throughout its history it was capital that first fed on the destructuration of every referential. the whole discourse of traditional production. which increases as it disappears. and among those power is always in the right. It retains all the features. it does nothing but multiply the signs and accelerate the play of simulation. disconnection. plays at remanufacturing artificial. and to overproduce. That is why today this "material" production is that of the hyperreal itself. expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it (no one wants it anymore. another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power .a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere. the reality principle. And as soon as it wishes to combat this disastrous spiral by secreting a last glimmer of reality.obsession with its death. The melancholy of societies without power:
. we will logically be under the total hallucination of power .a holy union that is reconstructed around its disappearance. And in the end the game of power becomes nothing but the critical obsession with power . deterritorialization. And at the same time. they turn against power the deterrent that it used so well for such a long time. Power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance. abstraction. economic. Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and every objective.

Nixon. power has no other recourse but to artificially revive and hallucinate them. of the generalized aesthetic of simulation. to a dying system of democratic values. now it can only be simulated. but in this case it is significant: the era of James Dean. political substance. Nixon. etc. of those who really died simply because they had a mythic dimension that implies death (not for romantic reasons. this changes nothing: the leftist penchant for detecting a rightist conspiracy beneath this brings out a false problem . that overdose of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning. of its "suspension. The Kennedys died because they incarnated something: the political. the "Left.this era is long gone. and the Kennedys. Watergate is still a mechanism for the ritual murder of power (the
. if not in fact. With the extenuation of the political sphere. who was not even found worthy of dying at the hands of the most insignificant. or the prophecy. unbalanced person (and though it is perhaps true that presidents are assassinated by unbalanced types." critical discourse. like theory.which is true phantasmatically. Marilyn Monroe. One must not resist this process by trying to confront the system and destroy it. These staged presidential assassinations are revealing because they signal the status of all negativity in the West: political opposition. who nonetheless carry out a social function as fundamental as that of presidents). Curiously. Ford." Power floats like money. the president comes increasingly to resemble that Puppet of Power who is the head of primitive societies (Clastres). the monkeys of power. against power has always been fulfilled. by demented people..a simulacral contrast through which power attempts to break the vicious circle of its nonexistence. it is the system itself that deploys against its own structures this violence that annuls all substance and all finality. It is in this way that the Spanish executions still serve as a stimulant to Western liberal democracy. crazy people. like language. Fresh blood. of its fundamental irresponsibility.the function of bringing death to. It is now the era of murder by simulation. from primitive societies to the present. Death is never an absolute criterion. Because. because this system that is dying from being dispossessed of its death expects nothing but that from us: that we give the system back its death. they were not staged. of the murder-alibi the allegorical resurrection of death. all have this simian mug. They must efface this defect and this complicity with their simulated murder. Criticism and negativity alone still secrete a phantom of the reality of power. End of revolutionary praxis. but because of the fundamental principle of reversal and exchange) . was nevertheless ritually put to death by Watergate. end of the dialectic. or neurotics. were at least perpetrated by simulation. etc. that we revive it through the negative. chance.this has already stirred up fascism. Johnson. . All previous presidents pay for and continue to pay for Kennedy's murder as if they were the ones who had suppressed it . Presidents Johnson and Ford were both the object of failed assassination attempts which. without which it no longer has any substance or an autonomous reality. If they become weak for one reason or another. which is only there to sanction the institution of power. whereas the new presidents are nothing but caricatures and fake film curiously. but for how much longer? The deterioration of all power is irresistibly pursued: it is not so much the "revolutionary forces" that accelerate this process (often it is quite the opposite).

of concealing for as long as possible. having no "legitimate" heirs. The spark of production. of the necessity of the king's sacrificial death. a perverse event. Nixon has nevertheless arrived at the goal of which all power dreams: to be taken seriously enough. and only that gives him the power and the quality to govern. For a long time now a head of state . Mao. the violence of its stakes no longer exist. and liquidated. power. see themselves forced to perpetuate themselves indefinitely . As is the fact that power is in essence no longer present except to conceal that there is no more power. as distinct from "true" power . so long as they resemble each other. This situation will no doubt end up giving rise to socialism. no filiation of power. This myth does nothing but translate the persistence. A simulation that can last indefinitely. But already impeachment is no longer assassination: it happens via the Constitution. The whole world still produces. and thus as the object of the law of supply and demand. like any other commodity. Through an unforeseen turn of events and via an irony that is no longer that of history." like leisure. No one would grant the least consent. a relation of force. he can only accumulate against himself the signs of reversion through murder . And it is through an artificial revitalization of all this that we try to escape this fact. denounced. or was. a stake . as it is from the death of God that religions emerge. is dependent on mass production and consumption. the object of a social "demand. only the fiction of a political universe remains. Completely purged of a political dimension. it is no longer subject to violence and death. to constitute a mortal enough danger to the group to be one day relieved of his duties. but subtly work has become something else: a need (as Marx ideally envisioned it but not in the same sense).in fact. the least devotion to a real person. it is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge. he being always already dead. which is implicated in the same loss. a strategy. This obsession has accumulated since the era of revolutions and of charismatic leaders: Hitler. A twisted advent. to which it is equivalent in the course of
. the death of the head of state. which foresees the official and sacrificial death of the king (the king or the chief is nothing without the promise of his sacrifice). the social itself. It is to his double.it is nothing but the object of a social demand.is nothing but the simulacrum of himself. Everything happens as if Mao or Franco had already died several times and had been replaced by his double. which infuriates him. and increasingly. an unintelligible reversion to the logic of reason. In contrast to the primitive rite.American institution of the presidency is much more thrilling in this regard than the European: it surrounds itself with all the violence and vicissitudes of primitive powers.which is. a structure. it. and at the same time the deception. We are still in the same boat: no society knows how to mourn the real. Its spark has disappeared. because. that a head of state remains the same or is someone else doesn't strictly change anything.popular myth never wishes to believe them dead. The same holds true for work. he is immunized by his impotence. to which allegiance is given. Franco. The pharaohs already did this: it was always one and the same person who incarnated the successive pharaohs. From a political point of view. Ford doesn't even have this opportunity anymore: a simulacrum of an already dead power. the modern political imaginary goes increasingly in the direction of delaying.no matter which one . of savage rituals).

a scenodrama (so as not to say a melodrama) of production. In the same way.in short. that is they are discourses of truth . Ideology only corresponds to a corruption of reality through signs.neither true nor false: Utopian. after declaring a strike. without a script or a screenplay. its dramas. or of an aesthetics of the hyperreal. in its radical authenticity . The producer's triumph was to say: "They lived as if we were not there. The "as if we were not there" being equal to "as if you were there. nor work. which is no longer a work stoppage. THE END OF THE PANOPTICON It is still to this ideology of lived experience . So. that is to say something else: a magic of work. it is no longer a question of the ideology of power. but both simultaneously. much more than did the "perverse" pleasure of violating someone's privacy." It is this Utopia. a trompel'oeil. It is always the goal of the ideological analysis to restore the objective process.but of the scenario of work. the Louds separated. a frisson of vertiginous and
. And of a doubling of the process of going on strike .that the American TV verite experiment attempted on the Loud family in 1971 refers: seven months of uninterrupted shooting. A demand exactly proportional to the loss of a stake in the work process. And the real of the strike as well. but its alternate pole in the ritual scansion of the social calendar. a "raw" historical document. even and especially if they are revolutionary. This is not a dream out of science fiction: everywhere it is a question of doubling the process of work. all while declaring himself (and in virtually being) permanently on strike. this paradox that fascinated the twenty million viewers. nonstop . In the "verite" experience it is not a question of secrecy or perversion.the traditional ethic that would obscure the "real" process of work and the "objective" process of exploitation . etc. as is the norm in a "self-managed" occupation." An absurd. to the footage of our landing on the moon.always good for countering the mortal blows of simulation. three hundred hours of nonstop broadcasting. the real of production. It is no longer a question of the ideology of work . its joys. the odyssey of a family. just as crisis is in production. has disappeared. it is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum. and the "greatest television performance.everyday life.*6 Same change in fortune as for power: the scenario of work is there to conceal that the real of work. there is no longer striking. Everything occurs as if each person had. but of the scenario of power. Whence that insoluble controversy: was TV itself responsible? What would have happened if TV hadn't been there? More interesting is the illusion of filming the Louds as if TV weren't there. "occupied" his place and work station and recommenced production. comparable. on the scale of our dayto-day life.striking incorporated just as obsolescence is in objects. simulation corresponds to a short circuit of reality and to its duplication through signs. a collective dramaturgy on the empty stage of the social. This is why in the end power is so much in tune with ideological discourses and discourses on ideology." It becomes more complicated because this family fell apart during the filming: a crisis erupted. its unexpected events. but of a sort of frisson of the real. exactly in the same terms as before.exhumation of the real in its fundamental banality. paradoxical formula .

Such is the last stage of the social relation. "The Louds: simply a family who agreed to deliver themselves into the hands of television. It is still. upper-middle-class standing. even if the panoptic focal point may be blind. The eye of TV is no longer the source of an absolute gaze. as in the statistical operation. at least a system of mapping. of distortion of scale. The liturgical drama of a mass society. The pleasure of an excess of meaning. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model.) Besides." the director will say. it is TV that is the truth of the Louds. ours. and in this sense it amounts to a death sentence (but is it still a question of truth?). in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. This still presupposes an objective space (that of the Renaissance) and the omnipotence of the despotic gaze. which is fascinating more on a metaphysical than on a sexual level. it is TV that watches you (live). of ideology. as in the Louds' operation. assured social and professional status. More subtly. it is. which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda.a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deterrence. but the manipulative truth of the test that sounds out and interrogates. a frisson of simultaneous distancing and magnification. this family was already hyperreal by the very nature of its selection: a typical ideal American family. of publicity. it is the camera lens that. three garages. it is Don't Panic that is listening to you" . of an excessive transparency. A term admirable in its ambiguity. Ideal heroine of the American way of life. five children. chosen in order to be glorified and to die beneath the flames of the medium.) but one of deterrence: "YOU are information. Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the hyperreal. California home.phony exactitude. of a sacrificial spectacle offered to twenty million Americans. It is to this truth that the Loud family was subjected by the medium of TV. a modern fatum. of computer cards that retain your preferred sequences." or again: "You are no longer listening to Don't Panic. etc. and the ideal of control is no longer that of transparency. as in ancient sacrifices. There one sees what the real never was (but "as if you were there"). or to the gaze "YOU are the model!" "YOU are the majority!" Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality. of cells that inform your sensory universe. when the bar of the sign falls below the usual waterline of meaning: the nonsignifier is exalted by the camera angle. nor the perspectival truth of the panoptic system and of the gaze. it is TV that is true. without the distance that gives us perspectival space and depth vision (but "more real than nature"). playing on the opposition of seeing and being seen. End of the panoptic system.
. comes to pierce lived reality in order to put it to death. it is TV that renders true. but always externally. of the genetic code that controls your combinations. "You no longer watch TV. In a way it is this statistical perfection that dooms it to death. TV verite. decorative housewife. Thus it is a question of a sacrificial process. Because heavenly fire no longer falls on corrupted cities. does it refer to the truth of this family or to the truth of TV? In fact. (This is also somewhat the case in porno. Something else in regard to the Louds. like a laser. and to die by it. Truth that is no longer the reflexive truth of the mirror. or with the medium. of the laser that touches and pierces. if not a system of confinement. in which the real is confused with the model.

No more violence or surveillance: only "information. It is the whole traditional world of causality that is in question: the perspectival. diffused. dissolution of life in TV . one remains dependent on the analytical conception of the media.
. the "active.*8 irreducible under pain of reabsorption into an aleatory and indeterminate process whose discourse can no longer account for it. between active and passive.spectralized. like these advertising laser sculptures in the empty space of the event filtered by the medium . TV manipulates us.you are the social. chain reaction. the difference. of the gaze. no more focal point. a kind of genetic code that directs the mutation of the real into the hyperreal. In all this. and one can no longer even say that the medium is altered by it. you have the word. such a viral. you are involved. One must think instead of the media as if they were. to pressure. no more center or periphery: pure flexion or circular inflexion. and the confusion of the medium and the message (McLuhan)*7 is the first great formula of this new era. but to their induction. just as the other micromolecular code controls the passage from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic one of the programmed signal. the gap. without the possibility of isolating the effects . nor in the specific kinds of alienation and repression that it implied. No more subject. to their illegible violence.the distinction between cause and effect.. to violence and blackmail by the media and the models. and thus to the very abolition of the spectacular. of which the situationists spoke. We are witnessing the end of perspectival and panoptic space (which remains a moral hypothesis bound up with all the classical analyses on the "objective" essence of power). Television. to their infiltration. you are the event. It is in this sense that one can say: TV is watching us. on an external active and effective agent. because it is itself a determined order. of the medium itself. There is no longer a medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible. We are no longer in the society of the spectacle. between subject and object. one must conceive of TV along the lines of DNA as an effect in which the opposing poles of determination vanish. TV alienates us." secret virulence." An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such. the analytic mode .dissolution of TV in life. in outer orbit. alarming presence of the medium. between subject and object: precisely the distance of meaning. according to a nuclear contraction. endemic. etc. and simulacra of spaces in which the effect of the real again comes into play. determinist mode. But one must watch out for the negative turn that discourse imposes: it is a question neither of disease nor of a viral infection. TV informs us . of power. on "perspectival" information with the horizon of the real and of meaning as the vanishing point. Such a blending." critical mode. for example in the case of the Louds. slow implosion. Now. the smallest possible gap (PPEP!).. is no longer a spectacular medium. chronic. because you are always already on the other side. and diffracted in the real. between the end and the means. retraction.indiscernible chemical solution: we are all Louds doomed not to invasion. of the old polar schema that always maintained a minimal distance between cause and effect.

the beginning from the end. of the violence without consequences that reigns throughout the world. of decoding. Nuclear suspension only serves to seal the trivialized system of deterrence that is at the heart of the media. but by analogy. indifferent. whose truth is indecipherable. The whole world pretends to believe in the reality of this threat (this is understandable on the part of the military. mediatized in which the distinction between these two poles can no longer be maintained. "Order. but into the differentiation of the active and the passive. in no matter what domain .it is no longer even a "dimension. Everywhere. but it is precisely at this level that there are no strategic stakes. And this deterrence comes from that fact that even the real atomic clash is precluded . this whole process can only be understood in its negative form: nothing separates one pole from another anymore. Here and there." or perhaps it is the fourth (which is denned. by zero-sum signs like those that regulate the "strategy of games" (but the true equation is elsewhere. a fantastic telescoping.not into passivity. of the differential mode of determination.an absorption of the radiating mode of causality. In fact. in Einsteinian relativity by the absorption of the distinct poles of space and time). they are neither more nor less active or passive than a living substance is vis-a-vis its molecular code. a dimension of which we know nothing . transforming the life left us into survival. one enters into simulation. which "goes" from the DNA nucleus to the "substance" that it "informs. of a vector. into a stake without stakes .not even into a life insurance policy: into a policy that already has no value). biological. THE ORBITAL AND THE NUCLEAR The apotheosis of simulation: the nuclear. Television. vis-à-vis TV. message": all of these attempt to render the thing intelligible to us. retranscribing in terms of inscription. with its positive and negative charge . DNA realizes this aleatory reduction at the level of living matter. the gravity of their exercise and the discourse of their "strategy" are at stake).It is this gap that vanishes in the process of genetic coding. The most insignificant of our behaviors is regulated by neutralized. However.political. of a determination. a simulacrum that dominates everything and reduces all "ground-level" events to being nothing but ephemeral scenarios. equivalent signs. also reaches this indefinite limit in which. In the process of molecular control. It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives." there is no longer the traversal of an effect. however. a single nebula whose simple elements are indecipherable. it is deterrence that gives them leukemia.precluded like the eventuality of the real in a system of signs. of a message. and thus into absolute manipulation . of the aleatory apparatus of all the choices that are made for us. psychological. impulse. of the relation. of an energy. there is a kind of contraction of one over the other.an implosion of meaning. the balance of terror is never anything but the spectacular slope of a system of deterrence that has insinuated itself from the inside into all the cracks of daily life. signal. That is where simulation begins. pure and simple. The whole originality of the situation lies in the improbability of destruction. in the case of the Louds. and the unknown is precisely that variable of simulation which makes of the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form. a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion . in which indeterminacy is not so much a question of molecular randomness as of the abolition.
.

environment . every confrontation contract in proportion to this blackmail that interrupts. and thanks to Damocles' nuclear sword. for installing a universal security system. Trajectory. nor an adversary nor a strategy .it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes. freezes them all. every finality. Atomic war. calculation. A gigantic involution that makes every conflict. physiology. The balance of terror is the terror of balance. except without a doubt in the very initial stages of the cold war. and political desert. and around it grows the historical. energy. And the progressive satellization of the whole planet through this hypermodel of security.Deterrence precludes war . it is the operational immanence of every detail that is law. it circulates and is exchanged between nuclear protagonists exactly as is international capital in the orbital zone of monetary speculation whose fluctuations suffice to control all global exchanges. is the function of the space program. like the Trojan War. a universal lockup and control system whose deterrent effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash (which was never in question. This is why the space program was so easily able to replace it in the 1960s (Kennedy/Khrushchev). implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution. it is the system of deterrence that grows.it is
. rather. The risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext. of the launching of satellites if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation. of satellization of which the lunar module is the perfect embryo? Programmed microcosm. No strategy is possible any longer.nothing can be left to contingencies. The same goes for peaceful nuclear power stations. when one still confused the nuclear apparatus with conventional war) but. through the sophistication of weapons (a sophistication that surpasses any possible objective to such an extent that it is itself a symptom of nullity). neutralizes." Because what. of the conquest of the moon. social. this is the total universe of the norm the Law no longer exists. will not take place. of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance." threat. where nothing can be left to chance. in a state of asepsis and weightlessness . everywhere where the notion of security becomes omnipotent. or to develop concurrently as a form of "peaceful coexistence. Deterrence is not a strategy. What is hatched in the shadow of this mechanism with the pretext of a maximal. The political stake is dead. Pacification does not distinguish between the civil and the military: everywhere where irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated. only simulacra of conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes remain. A universe purged of all threat of meaning. Deterrence itself is the neutral. The "space race" played exactly the same role as nuclear escalation. any story be deployed according to its own logic because it risks annihilation. and escalation is only a puerile game given over to the military. is the perfection of the best system of control that has ever existed. any more than floating capital has a real referent of production) that circulates in nuclear orbit suffices to control all the violence and potential conflicts around the world. There is no longer a subject of deterrence. ultimately. No longer can any revolt.the archaic violence of expanding systems. Thus the money of destruction (without any reference to real destruction. "objective. psychology. at the much greater probability of any real event. everywhere where the norm replaces the old arsenal of laws and violence (including war).

Just watching it produces vertigo. it is the planet earth that becomes a satellite. of maximum security and deterrence that today controls the spread of the social. doomed to the descriptive transparency of mechanisms of information.
. all events are absorbed by this eccentric gravitation. the fulfillment of an earlier dream). In fact. but which has now entered its accelerated phase. into whose orbit all the once unique forms of style and writing will be reabsorbed. every deployment of the real is impossible. but which for the moment is translated by an inverse. by the immanent wonder of the programmed unfolding of events. of finality. irreversible process: the generalized deterrence of chance. Fascination with the maximal norm and the mastery of probability. Through the orbital inscription of a spatial object. implosive. All energy. we are dumbfounded by the perfection of the programming and the technical manipulation.*9 Resist the evidence: in satellization. the spatial and nuclear models do not have their own ends: neither the discovery of the moon. hyperreal. biological. toward a limit that one believed would be explosive (revolution). which is inscribed in their heavens at precisely the same time by the linkup of the two satellites. the model vectors of a system of planetary control (where even the superpowers of this scenario are not free . he who is satellized is not who one might think. Because if the law.the suppression by the Chinese of ideogrammatic writing and conversion to the Roman alphabet. rupture. Vertigo of the model. neutralization and homogenization of everyone else on earth. of transversality. Here as well. all the terrestrial microsystems are satellized and lose their autonomy. The vertigo of a world without flaws. but without fear or drive. nothing will be left to chance. in the other. every principle of meaning is absorbed. apotheosis of peaceful coexistence . everything condenses and implodes toward the only micromodel of control (the orbital satellite). The simultaneity of two events in the month of July 1975 illustrated this in a striking manner: the linkup in space of the two American and Soviet supersatellites. the norm fixes. in this forking of the nuclear and the genetic. The satellization of language: the means for the Chinese to enter the system of peaceful coexistence. as conversely. dimension. One no longer fantasizes about the minutiae of a program. rather. it is the same model of programmatic infallibility. if order. nor military and strategic superiority. Through the orbital instantiation of a system of control like peaceful coexistence. still taps a perverse imaginary. with its aura of violence. everything converges and implodes on the molecular micromodel of the genetic code. with its aura of transgression. rather. Their truth is to be the models of simulation. which unites with the model of death. There lies the true nuclear fallout: the meticulous operation of technology serves as a model for the meticulous operation of the social. and insignificant. Between the two. fascinates. which began centuries ago. moreover this is the essence of socialization. of contradiction. and makes every imaginary involute. stupefies.the whole world is satellized). of accident. The latter signifies the "orbital" instantiation of an abstract and modelized system of signs.this very perfection that is fascinating. in the simultaneous assumption of the two fundamental codes of deterrence. Now. The exaltation of the crowds was not a response to the event of Rinding on the moon or of sending a man into space (this would be. Orbital flight of the Big Two. it is the terrestrial principle of reality that becomes eccentric. or complexity in a sociality illuminated by the norm.

because it took place at the intersection of a maximum historical and "revolutionary" stake. vanish from one day to the next as if by magic? Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States. they are no longer anything but the duplex effect of simulation at the summit. is total liquidation.which seems a matter of life and death. precapitalist structures.
. the USA pulled out of Vietnam but won the war. The nonintervention of China obtained and secured after many years. so ferocious. they no longer have any meaning. Something else. the murderous antagonism of the adversaries . Same scenario in the Algerian war. But. but whose objective outcome in war. so hard. This same reduction of forces can be seen on the field.events continue at ground level. The stake is thus that of a political relay. Nothing of the sort occurred.Washington relations): this was what was at stake in the war in Vietnam. demobilized so easily.Yet. This war. That is why it was deescalated. And the war ended "spontaneously" when this objective was achieved. one could let them take over. so long. communitarian. What meaning did this war have. That theirs is a Communist order is not serious in the end: it had proved itself. which is played out as such (or else one could never send people to get themselves killed in this kind of thing). and in this sense. unnamed. remained unliquidated. subtly. and of the installation of this deterrent authority. the war could stop: it had attained its objective. it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system. When at last the war had passed into the hands of regular troops in the North and escaped that of the resistance. misfortunes are even more numerous. never spoken. It marked the arrival of China to peaceful coexistence. at bottom. It is even more effective than capitalism in the liquidation of "savage" and archaic precapitalist structures. the transition from a radical alternative to political alternation in a system now essentially regulated (the normalization of Peking . The best example can only be that of the war in Vietnam. then. the shift from a global strategy of revolution to one of shared forces and empires. despite this deterrence by the orbital power . The other aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed violence. Tribal. The war lasted as long as elements irreducible to a healthy politics and discipline of power. the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else. As soon as the Vietnamese had proved that they were no longer the carriers of an unpredictable subversion.the nuclear or molecular code . Chinas apprenticeship to a global modus vivendi. behind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes. even a Communist one. it could be trusted. given the global process of the contiguity and simultaneity of data. was nothing but a crucial episode of peaceful coexistence. with the equal complicity of the two adversaries. and wasn't its unfolding a means of sealing the end of history in the decisive and culminating historic event of our era? Why did this war. took place.

every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be abolished, that is the object of murder in war - and war itself, in its immense, spectacular death apparatus, is nothing but the medium of this process of the terrorist rationalization of the social - the murder on which sociality will be founded, whatever its allegiance, Communist or capitalist. Total complicity, or division of labor between two adversaries (who may even consent to enormous sacrifices for it) for the very end of reshaping and domesticating social relations. "The North Vietnamese were advised to countenance a scenario for liquidating the American presence in the course of which, of course, one must save face." This scenario: the extremely harsh bombardments of Hanoi. Their untenable character must not conceal the fact that they were nothing but a simulacrum to enable the Vietnamese to seem to countenance a compromise and for Nixon to make the Americans swallow the withdrawal of their troops. The game was already won, nothing was objectively at stake but the verisimilitude of the final montage. The moralists of war, the holders of high wartime values should not be too discouraged: the war is no less atrocious for being only a simulacrum - the flesh suffers just the same, and the dead and former combatants are worth the same as in other wars. This objective is always fulfilled, just like that of the charting of territories and of disciplinary sociality. What no longer exists is the adversity of the adversaries, the reality of antagonistic causes, the ideological seriousness of war. And also the reality of victory or defeat, war being a process that triumphs well beyond these appearances. In any case, the pacification (or the deterrence) that dominates us today is beyond war and peace, it is that at every moment war and peace are equivalent. "War is peace," said Orwell. There also, the two differential poles implode into each other, or recycle one another - a simultaneity of contradictions that is at once the parody and the end of every dialectic. Thus one can completely miss the truth of a war: namely, that it was finished well before it started, that there was an end to war at the heart of the war itself, and that perhaps it never started. Many other events (the oil crisis, etc.) never started, never existed, except as artificial occurrences - abstract, ersatz, and as artifacts of history, catastrophes and crises destined to maintain a historical investment under hypnosis. The media and the official news service are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of facts. All the events are to be read backward, or one becomes aware (as with the Communists "in power" in Italy the retro, posthumous rediscovery of the gulags and Soviet dissidents like the almost contemporary discovery, by a moribund ethnology, of the lost "difference" of Savages) that all these things arrived too late, with a history of delay, a spiral of delay, that they long ago exhausted their meaning and only live from an artificial effervescence of signs, that all these events succeed each other without logic, in the most contradictory, complete equivalence, in a profound indifference to their consequences (but this is because there are none: they exhaust themselves in their spectacular promotion) - all "newsreel" footage thus gives the sinister impression of kitsch, of retro and porno at the same time doubtless everyone knows this, and no one really accepts it. The reality of simulation is unbearable - crueler than Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, which was still an attempt to create a dramaturgy of life, the last gasp of an ideality of the body, of blood, of violence in a

system that was already taking it away, toward a reabsorption of all the stakes without a trace of blood. For us the trick has been played. All dramaturgy, and even all real writing of cruelty has disappeared. Simulation is the master, and we only have a right to the retro, to the phantom, parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials. Everything still unfolds around us, in the cold light of deterrence (including Artaud, who has the right like everything else to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty). This is why nuclear proliferation does not increase the risk of either an atomic clash or an accident - save in the interval when the "young" powers could be tempted to make a nondeterrent, "real" use of it (as the Americans did in Hiroshima - but precisely only they had a right to this "use value" of the bomb, all of those who have acquired it since will be deterred from using it by the very fact of possessing it). Entry into the atomic club, so prettily named, very quickly effaces (as unionization does in the working world) any inclination toward violent intervention. Responsibility, control, censure, self-deterrence always grow more rapidly than the forces or the weapons at our disposal: this is the secret of the social order. Thus the very possibility of paralyzing a whole country by flicking a switch makes it so that the electrical engineers will never use this weapon: the whole myth of the total and revolutionary strike crumbles at the very moment when the means are available - but alas precisely because those means are available. Therein lies the whole process of deterrence. It is thus perfectly probable that one day we will see nuclear powers export atomic reactors, weapons, and bombs to every latitude. Control by threat will be replaced by the more effective strategy of pacification through the bomb and through the possession of the bomb. The "little" powers, believing that they are buying their independent striking force, will buy the virus of deterrence, of their own deterrence. The same goes for the atomic reactors that we have already sent them: so many neutron bombs knocking out all historical virulence, all risk of explosion. In this sense, the nuclear everywhere inaugurates an accelerated process of implosion, it freezes everything around it, it absorbs all living energy. The nuclear is at once the culminating point of available energy and the maximization of energy control systems. Lockdown and control increase in direct proportion to (and undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities. This was already the aporia of the modern revolution. It is still the absolute paradox of the nuclear. Energies freeze in their own fire, they deter themselves. One can no longer imagine what project, what power, what strategy, what subject could exist behind this enclosure, this vast saturation of a system by its own forces, now neutralized, unusable, unintelligible, nonexplosive except for the possibility of an explosion toward the center, of an implosion where all these energies would be abolished in a catastrophic process (in the literal sense, that is to say in the sense of a reversion of the whole cycle toward a minimal point, of a reversion of energies toward a minimal threshold). * NOTES * 1. Cf. J. Baudrillard, "L'ordre des simulacres" (The order of simulacra), in L'echange symbolique et la mort (Symbolic exchange and death) (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).

2. A discourse that is itself not susceptible to being resolved in transference. It is the entanglement of these two discourses that renders psychoanalysis interminable. 3. Cf. M. Perniola, Icônes, visions, simulacres (Icons, visions, simulacra), 39. 4. This does not necessarily result in despairing of meaning, but just as much in the improvisation of meaning, of nonmeaning, of many simultaneous meanings that destroy each other. 5. Taken together, the energy crisis and the ecological mise-en-scène are themselves a disaster movie, in the same style (and with the same value) as those that currently comprise the golden days of Hollywood. It is useless to laboriously interpret these films in terms of their relation to an "objective" social crisis or even to an "objective" phantasm of disaster. It is in another sense that it must be said that it is the social itself that, in contemporary discourse, is organised along the lines of a disaster-movie script. (Cf. M. Makarius, La stratégic de la catastrophe [The strategy of disaster], 115.) 6. To this flagging investment in work corresponds a parallel decline in the investment in consumption. Goodbye to use value or to the prestige of the automobile, goodbye amorous discourses that neatly opposed the object of enjoyment to the object of work. Another discourse takes hold that is a discourse of work on the object of consumption aiming for an active, constraining, puritan reinvestment (use less gas, watch out for your safety, you've gone over the speed limit, etc.) to which the characteristics of automobiles pretend to adapt. Rediscovering a stake through the transposition of these two poles. Work becomes the object of a need, the car becomes the object of work. There is no better proof of the lack of differentiation among all the stakes. It is through the same slippage between the "right" to vote and electoral "duty" that the divestment of the political sphere is signaled. 7. The medium/message confusion is certainly a corollary of that between the sender and the receiver, thus sealing the disappearance of all dual, polar structures that formed the discursive organization of language, of all determined articulation of meaning reflecting Jakobson's famous grid of functions. That discourse "circulates" is to be taken literally: that is, it no longer goes from one point to another, but it traverses a cycle that without distinction includes the positions of transmitter and receiver, now unlocatable as such. Thus there is no instance of power, no instance of transmission - power is something that circulates and whose source can no longer be located, a cycle in which the positions of the dominator and the dominated are exchanged in an endless reversion that is also the end of power in its classical definition. The circularization of power, of knowledge, of discourse puts an end to any localization of instances and poles. In the psychoanalytic interpretation itself, the "power" of the interpreter does not come from any outside instance but from the interpreted himself. This changes everything, because one can always ask of the traditional holders of power where they get their power from. Who made you duke? The king. Who made you king? God. Only God no longer answers. But to the question: who made you a psychoanalyst? the analyst can well reply: You. Thus is expressed, by an inverse simulation, the passage from the "analyzed" to the "analysand," from passive to active, which simply describes the spiraling effect of the shifting of poles, the effect of circularity in which power is lost, is dissolved, is resolved in perfect

. begins to be put in place. Gigantic circumvolution. which is the secret of the whole discourse of manipulation and thus. the secret of any new power in the erasure of the scene of power. which today is the substitution for the power of God with the power of the people as the source of power. but of the order of tactility and commutation). 8.manipulation (it is no longer of the order of directive power and of the gaze. La police des/amilles [The policing of families]). circumlocution of the spoken word.everything comes from the people and everything returns to them. to a deterrence that cannot be appealed of the subject presumed to speak. and of power as emanation with power as representation. you who are the power. See also the state/family circularity assured by the fluctuation and metastatic regulation of the images of the social and the private (J. PPEP is an acronym for smallest possible gap. in the assumption of all words from which has resulted this fantastic silent majority characteristic of our time . or "plus petit écart possible. Donzelot. It is with this magnificent recycling that the universal simulacrum of manipulation.all of this started without a doubt in the political sphere with the democractic simulacrum. or: your question is already an answer.meaning. etc. AntiCopernican revolution: no transcendental instance either of the sun or of the luminous sources of power and knowledge . of the forced confession in the guise of freedom of expression. from the scenario of mass suffrage to the present-day phantoms of opinion polls. you who know. Impossible now to pose the famous question: "From what position do you speak?" "How do you know?" "From where do you get your power?" without hearing the immediate response: "But it is of you (from you) that I speak" . 9. this clever subterfuge. of trapping the subject in his own interrogation. leaving him without a reply."-TRANS. This simulacrum of the inversion or the involution of poles.
. which is equal to a blackmail with no end. as well as that of the conscious or unconscious management of the "spoken word" [parole]). because to the question that he poses one ineluctably replies: but you are the answer. today.the whole strangulatory sophistication of intercepting speech. Paradox: all bombs are clean: their only pollution is the system of security and of control they radiate as long as they don't explode. of the precession of the reply to the question (all the violence of interpretation lies there. it is you who are speaking. in every domain.

HISTORY: A RETRO SCENARIO In a violent and contemporary period of history (let's say between the two world wars and the cold war).a controlling idea no longer selects. Anything serves to escape this void. Thus the fetishized history will preferably be the one immediately preceding our
. finds refuge in cinema. The illusion would be to congratulate oneself on this "awareness of history on the part of cinema. this object is not just any object. it is often the last object perceived before the traumatic discovery. more confused essence)." as one congratulated oneself on the "entrance of politics into the university. this hemorrhage of values . war." Same misunderstanding. but emptied of references. in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution . the period immediately following the war . traversed by currents. and pacified monotony on the quotidian level . that all previous history is resurrected in bulk . retro fashions . but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history. in the same retro fascination. that is to say our myth.no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them. This trauma (loss of referentials) is similar to the discovery of the difference between the sexes in children. a retro politics. ideologies. It is by virtue of this fact that it takes the place of myths on the screen. History is our lost referential.this history exorcised by a slowly or brutally congealing society celebrates its resurrection in force on the screen. and particularly the last. as serious. more perverse. according to the same process that used to make lost myths live again. but precisely. when at least life and death were at stake. emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise. fascism. as profound. Myth. the panoply of events. Whereas so many generations. There is however a privileging of the immediately preceding era (fascism. with the air of a game and a field of adventure. it is myth that invades cinema as imaginary content. these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. it is history itself that invades the cinema according to the same scenario . lived in the march of history. that is. is this decline of strong referentials. posthumous liberalization.today one has the impression that history has retreated. leaving behind it an indifferent nebula. chased from the real by the violence of history. as irreversible: the fetishization of an object intervenes to obscure this unbearable discovery.it is in proportion to this distress that all content can be evoked pell-mell. the great trauma. only nostalgia endlessly accumulates: war. this leukemia of history and of politics. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede. The great event of this period. One can explain it by evoking the Freudian theory of fetishism (perhaps also a retro hypothesis). which is dubbed peaceful coexistence on a global level. this kind of politics is like sexuality or permanent education (or like social security in its time). the pageantry of the belle epoque.the innumerable films that play on these themes for us have a closer. denser. or the revolutionary struggles. The politics that enter the university are those that come from history. everything is equivalent and is mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and funereal exaltation. It is the golden age of despotic and legendary resurrections. Today. says Freud.the historical stake chased from our lives by this sort of immense neutralization. at least there was violence (albeit fascist). same mystification.

posthumously (the term historical has undergone the same fate: a "historical" moment. kino-. Barry Lyndon. rather than one of veritable films. you would have had to be sufficiently distracted to have thought it to be an original production from the 1950s: a very good film about the customs in and the atmosphere of the American small town. Therein objects shine in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that fundamentally they no longer resemble anything. one will never do better in . equational pleasure. there was history but there isn't any anymore."irreferential" era. those will also doubtlessly be better than those of the period. Most of what we see today (the best) is already of this order. which is still less amusing. the empty form of representation. cold pleasure.. in what? Not in evoking. congress. as insurrection and not as resurrection. but not only. it is naive to conclude that the evocation of fascism signals a current renewal of fascism (it is precisely because one is no longer there. etc. which in certain respects make one think of Barry Lyndon) to grasp the difference. Just a slight suspicion: it was a little too good. All the toxic radiation has been filtered. 1900. Today. historicosynthesis machines. pleasing simulacra that lack only the imaginary.*1 History thus made its triumphal entry into cinema. in precise doses. but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal. not a single error.. Its reinjection has no value as conscious awareness but only as nostalgia for a lost referential. Let's understand each other: their quality is not in question. an affinity that is not at all political. moral. One talks of remaking silent films. without weakness. aestheticized by retro). and the hallucination inherent to cinema. Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance. It is a question of life or death: these objects are no longer either living or deadly. etc. One has the impression of it being a question of perfect remakes. All. pure. so minute. A whole generation of films is emerging that will be to those one knew what the android is to man: marvelous artifacts. All the President's Men. figure are in this way designated as fossils). Cool. Barry Lyndon is the best example: one never did better.a coincidence.. frozen in the state in which a brutal loss of the real would have seized them. all the ingredients are there. Three Days of the Condor. perfect retro. Whence the omnipresence of fascism and of war in retro . In the "real" as in cinema. the hyperrealist restitution of 1950s cinema. more in tune. except the empty figure of resemblance. Stupefaction when one discovers that it is a 1970s film. monument. This does not signify that history has never appeared in cinema as a powerful moment.
. pleasure of machination. of extraordinary montages that emerge more from a combinatory culture (or McLuhanesque mosaic). as a contemporary process. etc. The problem is rather that in some sense we are left completely indifferent. and sentimental blotches of the films of that era. Senso. because one is in something else. That is why they are so exact. of large photo-. without the psychological. not even aesthetic in the strict sense: functional pleasure. in simulating. Take The Last Picture Show: like me. it is for this reason that fascism can again become fascinating in its filtered cruelty. better than the others.. the history that is "given back" to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a "historical real" than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real. One only has to dream of Visconti (Guepard. those historical films whose very perfection is disquieting: Chinatown. not even in evoking. purged.

Is there something of this already in Leone's Westerns? Maybe. dramatic relation. negative relation: it results from the loss of specificity of one and of the other. the cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a lost referent. the last great myth. is a truly absurd enterprise). social relations as a necessary reference to history. one has nothing but the tactical values of a group in which are admirably combined.the greatest degree of correspondence between the object and its function. The relation that is being formed today between the cinema and the real is an inverse. in its naked obviousness. in its boredom. the cool promiscuity. It is a myth that at once subtended the possibility of an "objective" enchainment of events and
. to the absolute real. technical virtuosity as a necessary reference to cinema. etc. along with the unconscious. remakes its classics. None of that in Kubrick. but in the mise-en-scène. Concurrently with this effort toward an absolute correspondence with the real. and with greater and greater perfection. which is the craziest of undertakings (similarly. the CIA as a mythological machine that does everything. unreality. remakes the silent film more perfectly than the original. who manipulates his film like a chess player. Hypotyposis and specularity. the mythical. and in that case it is neither retro nor hyperrealist. dead time. The cold collage. but in the cinematographic act. retroactivates its original myths. the immediate. Here. And this does not return to the old opposition between the spirit of finesse and the spirit of geometry: that opposition still comes from the game and the stakes of meaning. whereas we are entering an era of films that in themselves no longer have meaning strictly speaking. in its banality. a sensual rhetoric. for example. no culture has ever had toward its signs this naive and paranoid. not only in the historical content. history. The cinema and the imaginary (the novelistic.not only in style. In Visconti. and at the same time in its presumption. dialectical. Cinema plagiarizes itself. The cinema in its current efforts is getting closer and closer. The cinema and its trajectory: from the most fantastic or mythical to the realistic and the hyperrealistic. It is not really a question of perfection: technical perfection can be part of meaning.design . the asexual nuptials of two cold media that evolve in an asymptotic line toward each other: the cinema attempting to abolish itself in the cinematographic (or televised) hyperreal.: all of this is logical. All the registers slide in that direction. Terrorism is always that of the real. there is meaning. Robert Redford as polyvalent star.and this is not contradictory: it is the very definition of the hyperreal. History is a strong myth. puritan and terrorist vision. recopies itself. and its use value. full. an era of great synthesizing machines of varying geometry. including the delirious use of its own technique) used to have a lively. it is an effect of art. its veracity. technical perfection is an effect of the model: it is one of the referential tactical values. perhaps. the unsignified. Chinatown: it is the detective movie renamed by laser. In the absence of real syntax of meaning. a passionate game. who makes an operational scenario of history. functionalism's pretension to designating . cinema also approaches an absolute correspondence with itself . in its pretension to being the real.

the reinjection of death. Because cinema itself contributed to the disappearance of history. Fascism itself.
. that today seems to be increasingly lost. It only resurrects ghosts. which was substituted for all other value . It is this fabulous character. if one can call it that. and this is irreversible. of a "political aesthetic of death" at a time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of collective values. Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history. all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all life. the mythical energy of an event or of a narrative. and it itself is lost therein. and it is a response to that. it would not have tapped into this massive energy if it hadn't been a resistance to something much worse. Yet again. to the restitution of an absolute simulacrum of the past or the present. Today cinema can place all its talent. to a particular scene of the past or of the present. of the operationalization of all social and individual life already makes itself strongly felt in the West. with a perfect rendering (as elsewhere the obsession with real time or with the minute quotidianeity of Jeanne Hilmann doing the dishes). this negative and implacable fidelity to the materiality of the past. with which no interpretation has been able to come to grips (neither the Marxist one of political manipulation by dominant classes. the mad intensification of collective value (blood.we are all complicitous in this.causes and the possibility of a narrative enchainment of discourse. Fascism is a resistance to this. can already be interpreted as the "irrational" excess of mythic and political referentials. everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value. Fascism's cruelty. Behind a performative and demonstrative logic: the obsession with historical fidelity. its terror is on the level of this other terror that is the confusion of the real and the rational. nor the Reichian one of the sexual repression of the masses. The age of history. this neutralization and pacification of life. the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy. demented resistance. and to the advent of the archive. * NOTE * 1. irrational. even if it is a profound. is also the age of the novel. which deepened in the West.). "objective" form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it. to fixing it in its visible. nor the Deleuzian one of despotic paranoia). people. race. etc.

the whole political and pedagogical orchestration that came from every direction to attempt to give meaning to the event (the televised event this time) was not at all excessive. This forgetting is still too dangerous. and for the masses who are themselves cold. etc. of history. same absorption without an echo. same inverse. that one attempts to rekindle a cold historical event. who will only have the opportunity for a tactile thrill and a posthumous emotion.a sure sign that "that" will never again occur. Panicked blackmailing around the possible consequence of this broadcast on the imagination of children and others. because it is also the extermination of memory. In order to rekindle all that. deterred from their very own death) to rekindle this cold event through a cold medium. which "vill make them spill into forgetting with a kind of good aesthetic conscience of the catastrophe. will never in effect be reproduced. And one would like to have us believe that TV will lift the weight of Auschwitz by making a collective awareness radiate. and the eventually self-managed masses no longer even in revolt: deterred until death. deterrence. finally achieves its aesthetic dimension in this way . finally elevated here to a mass level. because it has always been in the midst of currently reproducing itself. in any case unlocatable by us.) and in regard to cold masses (the Jews no longer even concerned with their own death. television. But what one exorcises in this way at little cost. etc. or. All the pedagogues and social
. but of a medium of deterrence. and precisely in the very form in which one pretends to denounce it. but through the sound track and image track. a deterrent thrill as well. and extermination in a still more systematic way. a televised object (fundamental rule of McLuhan's. of the not-said. Same process of forgetting. everywhere. inaccessible to us in its truth. This artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination . Even the type of sociohistorical dimension that still remained forgotten in the form of guilt. whereas television is its perpetuation in another guise.HOLOCAUST Forgetting extermination is part of extermination. that efface man in his own memory). that is to say. which must not be forgotten). of shameful latency. What no one wants to understand is that Holocaust is primarily (and exclusively) an event. and for the price of a few tears. if that is possible. in the medium itself of this supposed exorcism: television. annihilation. radiating forgetfulness. much too late for it to be able to make real waves and profoundly disturb something. than the camps themselves. Forgetting. of cooling systems. of liquidation. especially through a medium that is itself cold. of extermination." everybody has trembled and bawled in the face of extermination . the first major event of cold systems. rather. One no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas chamber. This forgetting is as essential as the event. of systems of deterrence and extermination that will then be deployed in other forms (including the cold war. it is artificial memories that efface the memory of man. same black hole as Auschwitz. same annihilation of memories and of history. through the universal screen and the microprocessor. of the social.it is achieved in retro.but late. and especially. this time no longer under the auspices of a site of annihilation. implosive radiation. tragic but cold. because now "everyone knows. no longer exists. it must be effaced by an artificial memory (today.

But this confusion will never be lifted. is immediately located in your head . the collective impact of the message .you are the screen. and the TV watches you . from the cold monster of extermination. of the phantasm. not even that: a miniaturized terminal that. the social inertia of cold systems. From there. The objective is thus to produce them at all cost. speech.it transistorizes all the neurons and passes through like a magnetic tape . which is still blessed (but less and less so because more and more contaminated by TV) with an intense imaginary . of TV in particular. a hot social. heated discussion. history.because the cinema is an image. of the mirror. it is necessary to speak of the cold light of television.a tape. but a myth. something that still retains something of the double.workers mobilized to filter the thing. in fact. That is the fundamental problem. investment. One lacks stakes. why it is harmless to the imagination (including that of children) because it no longer carries any imaginary and this for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. as if there were some danger of infection in this artificial resurrection! The danger was really rather the opposite: from the cold to the cold. and this broadcast served this purpose: to capture the artificial heat of a dead event to warm the dead body of the social. not an image. which suggests nothing. It was thus necessary that the whole world mobilize itself to remake the social. which mesmerizes.whereas it is well understood that the polls only verify the televisual success of the medium itself. which itself is nothing but a screen. hence communication. Nothing of any of this in the "TV" image. of the dream.
. By contrast with the cinema. That is to say not only a screen and a visual form. Whence the addition of the supplementary medium to expand on the effect through feedback: immediate polls sanctioning the massive effect of the broadcast. etc.

THE CHINA SYNDROME The fundamental stake is at the level of television and information. remains improbable and in some sense imaginary.
. Or. isn't it nothing but the symptom of the imaginary (Network and China Syndrome) or the opposite? Marvelous indifferentiation. we will know nothing. Marvelous title. in its imminent catastrophe. the universalization of a system of deterrence. that is to say of hot catastrophe. cold catastrophe. they have the same power of deterrence as cold systems do. in principle the veritable heart of the matter.an indissoluble trilogy in which one no longer knows which is the effect and which is the symptom: the ideological argument (Watergate effect). this China Syndrome. rather.the cold medium of television having been simply substituted for the cold system of extermination one believed to be exorcising through it . Besides. Thus the nuclear. because TV and information in general are a form of catastrophe in the formal and topological sense Rene Thorn gives the word: a radical qualitative change of a whole system. has vanished and become illegible. and Network: such is the trilogy of The China Syndrome . then. Just as the extermination of the Jews disappeared behind the televised event Holocaust . it. a drama that substitutes for the nuclear catastrophe that will not occur.the murder of the technical director by the Special Forces. conceals a long. but implosive: it cools and neutralizes the meaning and the energy of events." that of the reactor. ideal constellation of simulation. TV itself is also a nuclear process of chain reaction. The homology of the nuclear and of television can be read directly in the images: nothing resembles the control and telecommand headquarters of the nuclear power station more than TV studios.the real (Harrisburg). behind the presumed risk of explosion. it does not work on the imaginary plane: the drama unfolds on the screens and nowhere else). Harrisburg. isn't it nothing but the symptom of the nuclear (Harrisburg effect) or of the computer science model (Network effect) .*1 Watergate. itself.so The China Syndrome is a great example of the supremacy of the televised event over the nuclear event which. the film shows this to be the case (without wanting to): that TV is present precisely where it happens is not coincidental. like the real. it is the intrusion of TV into the reactor that seems to give rise to the nuclear incident . At the end of the film again comes the second massive intrusion of the press and of TV that instigates the drama .that it is Chinese adds the poetic and intellectual quality of a conundrum or supplication. and is at bottom unimportant in the film (when one attempts to suggest it to us. because the reversibility of symptoms and their convergence in the same process constitute precisely what we call a syndrome . TV and the nuclear are of the same nature: behind the "hot" and negentropic concepts of energy and information.because TV is like its anticipation and its model in the everyday universe: telefission of the real and of the real world. and the nuclear consoles are combined with those of the recording and broadcasting studios in the same imaginary. Thus everything takes place between these two poles: of the other "center.

and we will perhaps die of it. and it is for that reason that it is rejected . in the film as in Harrisburg. No more energy in its spectacular and pathetic form . From there to reverse our logic and to see in The China Syndrome the veritable event and in Harrisburg its simulacrum. in the film.but the cold energy of the simulacrum and of its distillation in homeopathic doses in the cold systems of information. in the image of the film. the film's induction of the nuclear incident in Harrisburg. the most surprising that was given us to witness: the real corresponded point by point to the simulacrum. But The China Syndrome is also not the original prototype of Harrisburg. But that is precisely what will never happen. Parousia of catastrophe: substantial food for our messianic libido. one is not the simulacrum of which the other would be the real: there are only simulacra. but the implosion. not according to a causal logic. from this panic of deterrence that it exercises in the invisible form of the nuclear. Because unhappiness is when there is no nuclear spectacle.all the romanticism of the explosion. incomplete character of the catastrophe. the whole world waits for something to blow up. being at the same time that of revolution . but this chain reaction is never that of the nuclear. But is all that so involuntary? Without positing magical links between the simulacrum and the real.it would be perfectly accepted if it lent itself to spectacle as previous forms of energy did. and bestows its spectacle on us. but according to the relations of contagion and silent analogy that link the real to models and to simulacra: to television's induction of the nuclear into the film corresponds. that it reassures us about the presence of energy. no longer in a spectacular nuclear explosion. Strange precession of a film over the real. Because an explosion is always a promise. And it is because of this that events no longer have meaning: it is not that they are insignificant in themselves. with a troubling obviousness. and that in "reality" Harrisburg arises from the China Syndrome cinema effect. nuclear reality arises from the television effect. and Harrisburg is a sort of second-order simulation. What else do the media dream of besides creating the event simply by their presence? Everyone decries it. to produce a simulation of catastrophe. it is no longer that of divine predestination. but everyone is secretly fascinated by this eventuality. including the suspended. there is only one step that must be cheerfully taken.Obsessive conjunction of The China Syndrome and Harrisburg. which had so much charm. which is essential from the point of view of deterrence: the real arranged itself. What will happen will never again be the explosion. it is that they were preceded
. it is our hope: note how much. it is that of simulacra and of the simulation where all the energy of the real is effectively swallowed. There is certainly a chain reaction somewhere. albeit catastrophic. That the "heart" of the reactor at last reveals its hot power of destruction. and that today perhaps takes a more deathly turn than that of all the explosions that rock us. no spectacle of nuclear energy in itself (Hiroshima is over). for destruction to announce itself and remove us from this unnameable panic. it is that of the precession of models. Because it is via the same logic that. Such is the logic of simulacra. but in a secret and continuous implosion. but it is just as inexorable. it is clear that the Syndrome is not a stranger to the "real" accident in Harrisburg.

of the explosive kind (without changing the course of things: did Hiroshima perceptibly delay.by the model. because it means returning things to their pure event. but into the simulation of nuclear catastrophe. it is God who through his cataclysms unknots the equilibrium of terror in which humans are imprisoned. any more than the atomic clash was at the dawning of the cold war. Besides. in the continuous reservoirs of information. the unions discovered fissures in the reactors. nothing happened.when Jane Fonda makes the truth explode directly (maximum Watergate effect). Alas. Miracle of contagions. In the film. rather. during the visit offered to the journalists by the EDF (French Electric Company). with which their processes only coincided. a mental destructuration through a mental strategy of catastrophe. miracle of analogic chain reactions. the essence of the film is not in any respect the Watergate effect in the person of Jane Fonda. real fusion would be a bad argument: the film would regress to the level of a disaster movie . is not meant to happen. It teaches us (once again without meaning to) that nuclear catastrophe does not occur. but. just at the end . Thus it would have been marvelous to repeat the script for The China Syndrome at Fessenheim. To this end the fissure must be a fiction. the power of catastrophe must. the universal process of deterrence?). also. this is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real. The simulation of nuclear catastrophe is the strategic result of this generic and universal undertaking of deterrence: accustoming the people to the ideology and the discipline of absolute security . not in any respect TV as a means of exposing nuclear vices. Therein lies the true contamination: never biological and radioactive. in the real either. And on the other hand yes! so powerful is the logic of simulacra: a week after. To which Nature is at times given: in its inspired moments. finds its strength in filtering catastrophe. her image is juxtaposed with what will inexorably follow it and efface it on the screen: a commercial of some kind. Besides. in the distillation of the nuclear specter through the omnipresent hertzian relays of information. The China Syndrome. therein lies terrorism's
. to the provocative presence of the media. but on the contrary TV as the twin orbit and twin chain reaction of the nuclear one. to produce or to reproduce a real catastrophe. the film introduces us to this mental strategy. it would constitute a retrograde incident.and there the film is unrelenting in Regard to its own argument .weak by definition. So. be disseminated in homeopathic. it is simulation that is effective.to the metaphysics of fission and fissure. The atom and the nuclear are made to be disseminated for deterrent ends. Closer to us. If one looks carefully. palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security. itself. The equilibrium of terror rests on the eternal deferral of the atomic clash. instead of stupidly exploding. and in going further. then the only means of mitigating this scenario would be to make the catastrophe arrive. that is to say not into the nuclear threat. it even delivers a lesson diametrically opposed to that of Watergate: if every strategy today is that of mental terror and of deterrence tied to the suspension and the eternal simulation of catastrophe. molecular doses. to repeat on this occasion the accident linked to the magic eye. The Network effect goes far beyond the Watergate effect and spreads mysteriously into the Harrisburg effect. deter. Thus. never the real. A real catastrophe would delay things.

* NOTE * 1.
. which will shortly follow the release of the film.ambiguity. The incident at the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island.

a psychotropic dream that had the goal neither of a victory nor of a policy at stake. a gigantic territory in which to test their arms. the war become film even before being filmed. Cinematographic power equal and superior to that of the industrial and military complexes. and for Americans it was primarily that: a test site. of such a holocaust of means. with the same clownish effect in overdrive. and one can even rejoice in this monstrous trick (exactly as with Wagner) . they are immersed in the machinery. and the same success.in this sense. Coppola does nothing but that: test cinema's power of intervention.if the Americans (seemingly) lost the other one. it is the best possible testimonial . and he himself makes movies in the same way. it is a dream. the sacrificial joy of so many millions spent. in which. there is no possible verdict. no critical sense.APOCALYPSE NOW Coppola makes his film like the Americans made war . the war in Vietnam would have been nothing other than what it is.with the same immoderation. in the mind of the creator. the pinnacle of this failed war. The war as entrenchment. excessive deployment of a power already filming itself as it unfolded.and it is necessary for us to believe in this: the war in Vietnam "in itself" perhaps in fact never happened. distant signs. his film is really the extension of the war through other means. that is not a value judgment. that nothing separates them. and its apotheosis. But there it is. global event. he hits us with that. but. the film is not without interest: it retrospectively illuminates (not
. with the same retro megalomania. . and make him crush the Vietnamese village to the sound of Wagner's music . and the remarkable paranoia that from the beginning conceived of this film as a historical.not being rotten with the moral psychology of war. test the impact of a cinema that has become an immeasurable machinery of special effects. a baroque dream of napalm and of the tropics. of so many misadventures. Coppola can certainly deck out his helicopter captain in a ridiculous hat of the light cavalry. No real distance. the war as a succession of special effects. Apocalypse Now is a global victory. it is bewildering. the film becomes war. no desire for "raising consciousness" in relation to the war: and in a sense this is the brutal quality of this film . but that of the film strictly speaking)? But there is no answer. the same excess of means. it is there. would not fundamentally have existed . and the same non-signifying furor. The war became film. but that tells you the war in Vietnam and this film are cut from the same cloth. equal or superior to that of the Pentagon and of governments. perhaps waiting for nothing but consecration by a superfilm. rather. they are part of the special effect.those are not critical. And all of a sudden. . as technological and psychedelic fantasy. In this sense. the same monstrous candor . The war abolishes itself in its technological test. that this film is part of the war . they certainly won this one. and one can say to oneself: how is such a horror possible (not that of the war. the sacrificial. which completes the mass-spectacle effect of this war.but one can always retrieve a tiny little idea that is not nasty. the two are joined by their common hemorrhage into technology. One revisits everything through cinema and one begins again: the Molochian joy of filming. The real war is waged by Coppola as it is by Westmoreland: without counting the inspired irony of having forests and Phillipine villages napalmed to retrace the hell of South Vietnam. their methods. their power.

neither about the war nor about cinema (at least the latter) if one has not grasped this lack of distinction that is no longer either an ideological or a moral one. . of the immanence of a thing in its very revolution. because the film is a phase of this war without end) what was already crazy about this war. of the carpet of bombs in the strip of film . One has understood nothing.
. irrational in political terms: the Americans and the Vietnamese are already reconciled.even retrospectively. but one of the reversibility of both destruction and production. one of good and evil. right after the end of the hostilities the Americans offered economic aid. . exactly as if they had annihilated the jungle and the towns. exactly as they are making their film today. of the organic metabolism of all the technologies.

Curiously. (What happened to money.the final impulse to translate a structure that no longer has a name. one thus finds the same contradiction that characterizes the Beaubourg thing: a mobile exterior. or something. the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone . geopolitical glacis. information. under the sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger). but with a mobility that would be up to this baroque theatricality of fluids that is the source of the originality of the carcass). of objects. with the same proportions. very contemporary.remodeling. a snobbish and hygienic design . Already the circulation of the human flux is less assured (the archaic solution of escalators in plastic sleeves. adapted to the "structure" of a "modern" space. commuting. All around. ecological. the structure of social relations given over to superficial ventilation (animation. the Pompidou Center functions as an incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it . the Beaubourg thing . What does the nuclear matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated. . Monument to the games of mass simulation. assigned to the "polyvalent" space and without a private work space. one ought to be aspirated.but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security. the Beaubourg machine. more supple. of
. is elaborated at the Center: cultural fission. explosion. to be absorbed. what happened to its mode of circulation.how to give it a name? Enigma of this carcass of flux and signs.a technical.. these no longer circulate at all. But the incoherence is the same. Seated in their corner. As for the material of the works.THE BEAUBOURG EFFECT: IMPLOSION AND DETERRENCE The Beaubourg effect. one ends up completely flat in front of . over the territory . of transparency. The same model. cooling." etc. It is the opposite of Roissy. slowly but surely. the circulation of fluids is unequal.an interior shriveled by the same old values." Therein is also a great tactic of deterrence: one condemns them to using all their energy in this individual defense. This said. of books and the so-called polyvalent interior space. This space of deterrence. of networks and circuits .a bit like the black monolith in 2001: insane convection of all the contents that came there to be materialized. the protective zone of control and deterrence that extends. On their feet and mobile. where from a futurist center of "spatial" design radiating toward "satellites. the people affect a cool demeanor. but a system of maximum security that radiates around them. political deterrence. propelled. this other fluid. self-management. and to be annihilated. they exhaust themselves secreting an artificial solitude. of fallout at Beaubourg?) Same contradiction even in the behavior of the personnel. Ventilation. and which is fundamentally a model of deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally. which is precisely not one. electrical networks the "traditional" fluids circulate there very well. pollution. which will encompass the whole social field. of emulsion. disinfection. traditional airplanes. media) and to an irreversibly deep implosion. . economic. articulated on the ideology of visibility. remaking their "bubble. cool and modern .

of putting in place a machine that is fundamentally uncontrollable. one exhibits Caesar there. And this is what underlies the beauty of the cadaver and the failure of the interior spaces. Thus one neutralizes everything together: Tinguely is embalmed in the museal institution. Our only culture in the end is that of hydrocarbons. In any case. but to the logicians of the established order. The general impression being that everything here has come out of a coma. and thus closer to the truth. levers. and which would have produced tons of cubic scrap iron. capable.*1 Because this architecture. survivors of an ideal accident. of consensus and contact. instead of that. that in its very success escapes them. in their obstinacy. One exhibits Dubuffet and the counterculture. is today. twisted. overtly proclaims that our time will never again be that of duration. with its networks of tubes and the look it has of being an expo or world's fair building. that our only temporality is that of the accelerated cycle and of recycling. this whole simulacrum of cultural values is annihilated in advance by the external architecture.figure of a culture already crushed by its own weight . of the current state of things. breaking cultural molecules and of their recombination into synthesized products. to hyperreality and to the implosion of culture-achieved today for us in the effect of transistorized circuits always threatened by a gigantic short circuit. Monument to total disconnection. a nice monument to our modernity.thus the culture of Beaubourg is ground. but the Beaubourg cadaver proclaims. and pressed into its smallest simple elements . deprived of all critical intelligence. But instead of breaking and compressing all culture here in this carcass that in any case has the appearance of a compression. that of refining. with its (calculated?) fragility deterring any traditional mentality or monumentality. This. whose inverse simulation acts as a referential for the defunct culture. Beaubourg is already an imperial compression . and that is the most exact reflection. that of the circuit and of the transit of fluids. and that this is good because culture is dead. the Beaubourg Museum wishes to conceal. Beaubourg flagrantly contradicts its explicit objectives. a condition that Beaubourg admirably retraces. and sanctioned by the blackmail to security. frozen like a science-fiction mecanoid. all the cultural contents of Beaubourg are anachronistic.like moving automobiles suddenly frozen in a geometric solid.polyvalency. of metal and human flesh inside is tailored to the geometric size of the smallest possible space . one reexhibits Tinguely's ephemeral and autodestructive machines under the sign of the eternity of culture. whereas one should have triumphantly accepted this death and erected a monument or an anti-monument equivalent to the phallic inanity of the Eiffel Tower in its time. It is nice to think that the idea did not come to some revolutionary spirit. Like the cars of Caesar. even in its contradictions. cut up. All of social discourse is there. Certainly. and on this level as well as on that of the treatment of culture. In this carcass that could have served as a mausoleum to the useless operationality of signs. cracking. virtually. frames. the very ideology of
. where the chaos of tubes. no longer external. Fortunately. Beaubourg falls back on its supposed artistic contents. but in a dishonest fashion. that everything wants to be animation and is only reanimation. that of all social relations.a bundle of defunct transmissions and metabolisms. but internal to the metallic and mechanical structure. because only an empty interior could correspond to this architectural envelope.

which. a cadaver all in flux and surface connections gives itself as content a traditional culture of depth. a combinatory. aleatory linkage and decoupling . aleatory practice. of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange. no longer even knows the distinction between signifier and signified. But'this is still too romantic and destructive. the truth of Mobius-doubtless an unrealizable Utopia. of initiation. and not always one of production and meaning: this is what might be proposed that would not be a miserable anticulture. There lies our truth. From today. But this culture takes place elsewhere.. it is not true that there is no coherence between form and content at Beaubourg.or even the circular Ruins: the slowed-down enchainment of individuals dreamed up by each other (not a dreamworld Disneyland. the universe of Borges . Nothing can be done about it.in short a culture of simulation and of fascination. implosion. into an order of simulacra (the third) that is completely homogeneous with the flux and pipes of the facade. is a manipulative. In another way.it should have been a labyrinth. An experimentation with all the different processes of representation: defraction. Yet-yet ."cultural production" is antithetical to all culture. have been placed in Beaubourg? Nothing. Too bad for the masses. then. slow motion. a laboratory of practical fiction). to the degree to which any of its contents is a countermeaning and annihilated in advance by the form. Beaubourg is nothing but a huge effort to transmute this famous traditional culture of meaning into the aleatory order of signs. Here. the only real cultural practice. striating the space.with the opposite pretext of acculturating them to
. too bad for Beaubourg. and one that no longer has any meaning. The question: "What should have been placed in Beaubourg?" is thus absurd. Perhaps revolving strobe lights and gyroscopic lights. this void would still have had value as a masterpiece of anticulture.in short. for which the crowd would have provided the moving base element? In fact. It cannot be answered because the topical distinction between interior and exterior should no longer be posed. but which Beaubourg still points to as right. What should. Dick . And it is in order to prepare the masses for this new semiurgic order that one brings them together here . however. nowhere. of seduction. as is that of visibility and of the polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret. everywhere..a bit like at the Exploratorium in San Francisco or in the novels of Philip K. An order of prior simulacra (that of meaning) furnishes the empty substance of a subsequent order. It is true if one gives any credence to the official cultural project. evidently. an aleatory redistribution of destinies through games or lotteries . if you had to have something in Beaubourg . Is it possible? Not here. a labyrinthine practice of signs. that of the masses. nor between form and content. ours (there is no longer a difference). infinite library. The void that would have signified the disappearance of any culture of meaning and aesthetic sentiment. Beaubourg illustrates very well that an order of simulacra only establishes itself on the alibi of the previous order. itself. But exactly the opposite occurs there.

but because they have for the first time the opportunity to massively participate in this great mourning of a culture that. Within a museal scenario that only serves to keep up the humanist fiction of culture. It is a truly revolutionary operation. One must thus start with this axiom: Beaubourg is a monument of cultural deterrence. Circulating in the space of transparency. this dismemberment. including all counterculture that is nothing but its apotheosis. into the agents of the execution of this culture. as one knows. with the same irresistible elan. Better: they are the disaster of Beaubourg. in both its excess and success. like a black box. in terms of input-output. This rush can no longer be measured against what was proposed as the cultural objective. their stampede. it is the masses themselves who put an end to mass culture. One must applaud this success of cultural deterrence. And they throw themselves at it. or. whom the building treats like a converter. One invites the masses to participate.is nothing but the phantom support for the operation of the medium itself. they put an end to this "polyvalent" space. elsewhere. insane and uncontrolled. All the antiartists. The masses. the masses are certainly converted into flux. their itch to see everything is objectively a deadly and catastrophic behavior for the whole undertaking. their curiosity annihilates the very contents of this culture of animation. it is a veritable fashioning of the death of culture that takes place. There lies the supreme irony of Beaubourg: the masses throw themselves at it not because they salivate for that culture which they have been denied for centuries. transforms the masses.meaning and depth. Their number. Not only does their weight put the building in danger. rush there to enjoy this execution. but at the same time. information or commodities . who should only be the livestock of culture. It is thus the masses who assume the role of catastrophic agent in this structure of catastrophe. The misunderstanding is therefore complete when one denounces Beaubourg as a cultural mystification of the masses. they have always detested. culture. Thus.they go one better: they participate and manipulate so well that they efface all the meaning one wants to give to the operation and put the very infrastructure of the edifice in danger. it is its radical negation. To tell the truth. of which Beaubourg was only the shameful incarnation. through their opacity and inertia. themselves. and it is a veritable cultural mourning for which the masses are joyously gathered. just like a refinery handles petroleum products or a flood of unprocessed material. in the end. and those who hold culture in contempt have never even gotten close to approaching the dissuassive efficacy of this monumental black hole that is Beaubourg. but their adhesion. this operational prostitution of a culture finally truly liquidated. It has never been so clear that the content .
. to resurrect it. The masses rush toward Beaubourg as they rush toward disaster sites. to play with the models . leftists.here. always a sort of parody. to simulate. precisely because it is involuntary. the only content of Beaubourg is the masses themselves. a hypersimulation in response to cultural simulation. their fascination. whereas any operation meant to put an end to culture only serves.

the camp. marks. absorbed and ejected at fixed times by their workplace. Here a critical mass beyond which the commodity becomes hypercommodity and culture hyperculture. Same process: nuclear operation of a chain reaction." not in the sense of a massive production or for use by the masses. galleries. but the production of the masses. this interference of all cultures. The masses are the increasingly dense sphere in which the whole social comes to be imploded. but to a kind of total descriptive universe.whose function is always to induce mass. Or again: it is in staging a reduced ideal model that one hopes for an accelerated gravitation. and to be devoured in an uninterrupted process of simulation. The masses as the final product of all sociality. as putting an end to sociality. and. of a magnetized molecule. or the Beaubourg "hypermarket of culture. of transistorized flux. etc.responses to all the questions they might ask themselves. Never. or specular operation of white magic.time of all the dispersed functions of the body and of social life (work. That is "mass production. Whence this concave mirror: it is from seeing the masses in the interior that the masses will be tempted to rush in. concentration. Already with the traditional museum this cutting up. is elaborated ." is already the model of all future forms of controlled socialization: retotalization in a homogeneous space . as elsewhere the objects of consumption. retranscription of all the contradictory currents in terms of integrated circuits. or integrated circuit that implosion traverses through and through . Here cultural objects.a work of testing. this unconditional aestheticization that constitutes the hyperreality of culture begins. and that makes of them something very different from the traditional sites of culture (monuments. are on the contrary the site of the implosion of the social. and directed interrogation: the people come here to select objects . More than a chain of work it is thus a question of a programmatic discipline whose constraints have been effaced behind a veneer of tolerance. traffic jams. or rather they come themselves in response to the functional and directed question that the objects constitute.that is to say no longer linked to distinct exchanges or determined needs. community arts centers.incessant circulation of choices. this regrouping. polling. Typical marketing method: the whole ideology of transparency here takes on its meaning. museums. leisure. An immense to-and-fro movement similar to that of suburban commuters. Space-time of a whole operational simulation of social life.
. the hypermarket. has culture lost its memory in the service of stockpiling and functional redistribution. an automatic agglutination of culture as an automatic agglomeration of the masses. but the museum is still a memory. waiting. the mass of consumers must be equivalent or homologous to the mass of products. at the same time. It is what one comes to learn in a hypermarket: hyperreality of the commodity . have no other end than to maintain you in a state of mass integration. libraries. references. decoding. Well beyond traditional institutions of capital. because these masses that one wants us to believe are the social. And this translates a more general fact: that throughout the "civilized" world the construction of stockpiles of objects has brought with it the complementary process of stockpiles of people . media culture).it is what one comes to learn at Beaubourg: the hyperreality of culture.). And it is precisely work that is at issue here . to produce a homogeneous human and mental flux. It is the confrontation and the fusion of these two masses that occurs in the hypermarket as it does at Beaubourg. readings.the line. as it did here. For that.

to pillage everything. useless to contest it. but beyond that.then Beaubourg constitutes the most audacious object and the most successful happening of the century! Make Beaubourg bend! New motto of a revolutionary order. Their ruse. an attraction that has all the characteristics of breaking and entering and of the violation of a sanctuary. Seeing. compressed air) through its own accelerated circulation. the latent violence in the supply of objects brings with it the inverse violence of men. Certainly they obey the imperative of deterrence: one gives them an object to consume. Do it! It is the best way of destroying it. learning does not touch them. an edifice to manipulate. the stupidest. and there is a specific violence in any mass of men also. to manipulate everything. The organizers (and the artists and intellectuals) are frightened by this uncontrollable watchfulness.a violence proper to its gravitation. To the challenge of mass acculturation to a sterilized culture. The onslaught is the only act the masses can produce as such . Beaubourg is at the level of culture what the hypermarket is at the level of the commodity: the perfect circulatory operator. which is prolonged in a brutal manipulation. the demonstration of anything (commodity. the least cultural one they possess) to the challenge of culturality thrown at it by Beaubourg. to its densification around its own locus of inertia. which is to respond in the very terms by which they are solicited. that wittly replies with its weight (that is to say with the characteristic most deprived of meaning.
. the masses respond with a destructive irruption. The only massive affect is that of manipulation. crowd. if they thus programmed the chance of putting an end with one blow to both architecture and culture . The masses are a locus of inertia and through that a locus of a completely new. Useless to set fire to it. because of the fact that it implodes . To mental deterrence the masses respond with a direct physical deterrence. Every stock is violent. The success of Beaubourg is no longer a mystery: the people go there for that. inexplicable violence different from explosive violence. deciphering. But at the same time they expressly aim. at this annihilation.if those who conceived of the project wanted this (but how to hope for this?).Thus for the first time. and without knowing it. Critical mass. a brutal and original response to the gift of an incomprehensible culture. because they never count on anything but the apprenticeship of the masses to the spectacle of culture.*2 People have the desire to take everything. to respond to the simulation in which one imprisions them with an enthusiastic social process that surpasses the objectives of the former and acts as a destructive hypersimulation. But if the supply of objects brings along with it the stockpiling of men. If the masses magnetized by the structure become a destructive variable of the structure itself . to swallow everything.a projectile mass that challenges the edifice of mass culture. It is their own challenge. with the single goal of making it bend. whose fragility already breathes catastrophe. implosive mass. Beyond thirty thousand it poses the risk of "bending" the structure of Beaubourg. they throw themselves on this building. a culture to devour. destructive fascination. culture. They never count on this active.

explosion. overdeveloped control circuits. We were a culture of liberating violence (rationality). It is the violence internal to a saturated ensemble. etc. of the irreversible extension of the field of reason and of
. criminal marginality. The dream of seeing all that explode by dint of contradictions is precisely nothing but a dream. of the liberation of productive forces. Implosion. nor of distance. to ventilate/to be ventilated. It is certainly a question of a tactile universe. which forgets nothing.) The city no longer revives. It is implosion that is the form of abolishing the "quaternary" world. war. It is something that is part of panic. Simulation of an immanent. violent destruction is what corresponds to a mode of production. no longer a visual or discursive one. Fire. nor of reflection. Beaubourg cannot even burn. this is its current mode of disappearance. Fires. revolutions. Panic in slow motion. Whether it be that of capital. they look as if they were touching. of the map coextensive with the territory and doubling it in its entirety: today the simulacrum no longer goes by way of the double and of duplication. The city does not repeat itself any longer according to a schema of reproduction still dependent on the general schema of production. both cybernetic and combinatory. Power implodes. To a universe of networks. Even the scenario of the underground city . and of flow correspond reversal and implosion. everything is foreseen. of combinatory theory. Such is the case for the city. dismantled and kidnapped by the crowd. their gaze is only an aspect of tactile manipulation. and which belongs to no one. even deep down it is remade starting from a sort of genetic code that makes it possible to repeat it indefinitely starting with an accumulated cybernetic memory. no external variable.Beaubourg could have or should have disappeared the day after the inauguration.each person taking away a fetishized bolt of this culture itself fetishized. Gone even the Borgesian Utopia. of the negativity internal or external to the city. has some archaic relation to its true mode of annihilation. The same for institutions. The people come to touch. to circulate/to make circulate. one that is potentially saturated and that will never again witness the liberating explosion. Subversion. feedback. and the people are directly implicated in a process: to manipulate/to be manipulated.is naive. plague. What is produced in reality is that the institutions implode of themselves. irreversible order. destruction are no longer the imaginary alternative to this type of building. or according to a schema of resemblance still dependent on a schema of representation. which is no longer of the order of representation. which would have been the only possible response to the absurd challenge of the transparency and democracy of culture . End of representation and implosion. increasingly dense. and of a world in panic. the state. (That is how one still restored after the Second World War. by dint of ramifications. catastrophes: the whole problematic of the anticity. power. of the whole space in an infinitesimal memory.the Chinese version of the burial of structures . there also. but by way of genetic miniaturization.

because it escapes the traditional schema of explosive violence: implosive violence that no longer results from the extension of a system. power) that is overencumbered. Perhaps it no longer even comes from the schema of indeterminacy.the schema is the same: that of an expanding sphere. It is the one we have learned to analyze and that is familiar to us: that which traces the paths of the social and which leads to the saturation of the whole field of the social. of the conquered and colonized space including the universal . This violence is unintelligible to us because our whole imaginary has as its axis the logic of expanding systems. and become involutive systems. in a field of inertia. it doesn't matter . in the fundamental energetic process of expanding systems. is abolished. energetic. that of a saturation as far as the interstitial and the infinity of networks. and of a hypertrophic control investing all the interstitial pathways. A violence that follows an inordinate densifkation of the social.have become sites of implosion in this sense. whether through slow or violent phases. The stellar systems also do not cease to exist once their radiating energy is dissipated: they implode according to a process that is at first slow. after a kind of maximum radiation (see Bataille's concepts of loss and expenditure in this sense.whether it be that of the revolution. on which he founds his sumptuary anthropology: it is the last explosive and radiating myth of our philosophy.certainly these if this hypothesis has any meaning . Perhaps the great metropolises .the field of value. the last fire of artifice of a fundamentally general economy. This violence is dialectical. as is the case for physical stellar systems. It is a violence that is determined. which we no longer know how to analyze. liberating. and then progressively accelerates .gigantic reversion of a field once the point of saturation is reached. and the solar myth of an inexhaustible radiation. sites of the absorption and reabsorption of the social itself whose golden age. as radiation and indefinite energy potential.in a star or in a rhizome. Something else if we move from a millennial phase of the liberation and disconnection of energies to a phase of implosion. The violence that accompanies it is that of a wider world: it is that of production. They translate the passage of defined systems of expansion to systems of production and expansion on all levels . which absorb all the surrounding energies. to a phase of the reversion of the social . the last perhaps.all the philosophies of the release of energy. Because the aleatory models that have taken over from classical models of determination and causality are not fundamentally different. analytical.the imaginary of radiation. The difference from the molar to the molecular is only a modulation. of the irradiation of intensities and of the molecularization of desire go in the same direction. A whole other violence appears today. so that they become black holes where the world as we know it. but this no longer has any meaning for us). The social involutes slowly or brutally. which anticipates the future forms of the social and of the energy of the social . contemporaneous with the double concept of capital and revolution. that of a liberated energy . the state of an overregulated system.they contract at a fabulous speed. cathartic.
. but from its saturation and its retraction. information. It is indecipherable because undetermined. a network (of knowledge. is doubtless past.

but something else began at the same time there: the violent involution of the social. who thought they were going further into the social . the idea of revolution also implodes. in contradiction. to its disaffection and to its total reversion.and not at all an unlocatable revolutionary dynamic. determined on that score. that is to say contrary to its rewriting in terms of revolutionary prosopopeia. * NOTES * 1. intelligible to historical reason. and to its radical understanding of Beaubourg.but at the same time it comes close in multiple places. Implosion is a process specific to incalculable consequences. and this implosion carries weightier consequences than the revolution itself. May 1968 was without a doubt the first implosive episode. of institutions. Slow seism. Certainly. and the consecutive and sudden implosion of power. the social. revolution itself. On the contrary. a challenge to the hegemony of the social. and thanks to 1968. of power . etc. of revolution. regressive . since 1968.like the one language imposes on us by exalting the opposite terms of evolution. 2. (The opposite energy?) One must stop oneself from taking implosion for a negative process -inert. like the desert. generalized self-management. of the social. in a brief moment of time.such is the imaginary that still dominates us . a retraction. moreover. more numerous than in 1968. the implosion. Still something else annihilates the cultural project of Beaubourg: the masses themselves also flood in to take pleasure in it (we will return to this later). a first violent reaction to the saturation of the social. In relation to this critical mass. grows-participation.which already envelops the political.and moreover a good part of the events of 1968 were still able to come from that revolutionary dynamic and explosive violence. to the ideology of the participants themselves. how derisory seems the demonstration of the students from Vincennes the evening of its inauguration!
. .fundamentally it is that which continues. but that never stopped afterward . management.

but referendum. they themselves come in response to the functional and directed question that the objects constitute. it is the mirror without silvering (tain) in the activity of consumption. practices . Thus all the messages in the media function in a similar fashion: neither information nor communication. The hypermarket cannot be separated from the highways that surround and feed it. the surface display. At the deepest level. These billboards. as the "policing" television. No relief. of examination. But who manipulates whom? Even repression is integrated as a sign in this universe of simulation. without mediation. The hypermarket resembles a giant montage factory. It is thus an allusion to repression. a game of splitting in two and doubling that closes this world on itself. another kind of work is at issue here. The self-service also adds to this absence of depth: the same homogeneous space. It remains to be seen how the hypermarket centralizes and redistributes a whole region and population. the agents (or the patients). There are employees who are occupied solely in remaking the front of the stage. this sign can thus coexist with all the others. The objects are no longer commodities: they are no longer even signs whose meaning and message one could decipher and appropriate for oneself. mobile and
. rather. A perfect surveillance on all fronts would require a heavier and more sophisticated mechanism of control than that of the store itself. brings together men and things . of confrontation. the billboards and the products themselves act as equivalent and successive signs. of the social code. that is put in place. the arrows point you toward these large triage centers that are the hypermarkets. because. observe and surveil you as well. and we are summoned to answer them. but a total screen where. in fact. absorbed and ejected at fixed times by their work place. Repression become deterrence is nothing but an extra sign in the universe of persuasion. and the answer is included in the question. mixed with the others. in concentric circles . they are tests. toward this hyperspace of the commodity where in many regards a whole new sociality is elaborated. The circuits of surveillance cameras are themselves part of the decor of simulacra.creating an immense to-and-fro movement totally similar to that of suburban commuters. trajectories. The latter looks at you. from the computer terminal . circular response. or as badly. no vanishing point where the gaze might risk losing itself. how it concentrates and rationalizes time. they are the ones that interrogate us. where a previous deletion by a consumer might have left some kind of a hole. for example those that huge billboards express by inviting you to relax and to choose in complete serenity. from the parking lots blanketed in automobiles. the work of acculturation. no perspective.a space of direct manipulation.HYPERMARKET AND HYPERCOMMODITY From thirty kilometers all around. perpetual test.further still. It would not be profitable. verification of the code. you look at yourself in it. instead of being linked to the chain of work by a continuous rational constraint. and of the verdict: people go there to find and to select objects . a "signal" of this order. or. in their uninterrupted display.responses to all the questions they may ask themselves.from the whole town as a total functional screen of activities. and even with the opposite imperative.

linked to that of transportation. which comes from the cybernetic kind (that is to say. as with the hypermarket or the new university. whose taboos are effaced beneath a veneer of tolerance. The hypermarket is the expression of a whole lifestyle in which not only the country but the town as well have disappeared to make room for "the metro area" . Schedules. work. knowledge. buying are aleatory as well. one is no longer dealing with functions (commerce. the micromodel. The large cities have witnessed the birth. give the impression of passing through aleatory circuits from one point of the chain to another. whereas the new cities are satellited by the hypermarket or the shopping center. automated by electronic controls. the hypermarket (especially in the United States) preexists the metropolitan area. and of the disintegration of the city itself. and whose form is nuclear and satellitic. With this factory. as an original synthesis of a society. but with a model of the disintegration of functions. It is the hypermarket that establishes an orbit along which suburbanizaiton moves. The hypermarket is already. hygiene. media. the scenarios of molecular control that are those of the genetic code). selection. that is to say corresponding to a totally deterritorialized function and mode of work. as a determined. The city.no longer the nineteenth-century factory nor the decentralized factory that. food. beyond the factory and traditional institutions of capital. A new morphogenesis has appeared. of a generation of large. transportation. of transit. One could believe that this implantation corresponds to the rationalization of diverse
. a place where the city and the country came to rub elbows. and of social life (work. of which the hypermarket is the equivalent. is installed in the suburbs. But the role of the hypermarket goes far beyond "consumption. and cease being cities to become metropolitan areas. on the level of consumption. serviced by a programmed traffic network. even of the modern city. spectacular arrangement . leisure. A model of directed anticipation.time of all the dispersed functions of the body. the model of all future forms of controlled socialization: retotalization in a homogeneous space . leisure) that are autonomized and displaced (which still characterizes the "modern" unfolding of the city). and hyperreality. facility. but the montage factory. qualitative space. even a modern one.a completely delimited functional urban zoning. The hypermarket as nucleus. of a whole structure of living and traffic. The cities remained cities. it is what gives rise to metro areas. without breaking the orbit of the city. no longer absorbs it. which is transplanted outside the city and treated as a hyperreal model. circular. in contrast to work practices. in about a century (1850-1950). retranscription of the contradictory fluxes in terms of integrated circuits. The "form" hypermarket can thus help us understand what is meant by the end of modernity. but this fundamental modernization. Negative satellites of the city that translate the end of the city. did not overthrow the urban structure. whereas the traditional market was in the heart of a city. It functions as an implant for the new aggregates.the future model of social relations. of the indeterminacy of functions." and the objects no longer have a specific reality there: what is primary is their serial.time of a whole operational simulation of social life. of a programmatic discipline.decentered. reproducing at the level of the territory. space . "modern" stores (many carried this name in one way or another). as the university or even the factory sometimes also does . culture). as the nucleus of a metropolitan area based on synthesis that no longer has anything to do with a city. But it is still a question of a chain. of the home.

original violence was born in response to the orbital satellization of a model (knowledge. and the hypermarkets no longer have the quality of a market. or even new catastrophes: May 1968 begins at Nanterre. without a past. the locus of convection and of destructuration. and not at the Sorbonne. or traditional transportation networks. behind the apparent function of these objects. These new objects are the poles of simulation around which is elaborated. factories. for the first time in France. to disaffection. from the moment a function becomes hyperspecialized to the point of being capable of being projected from every element on the terrain "keys in hand. But. in contrast to old train stations. that is to say in a place where. These factories and these universities are no longer factories nor universities. in fact. the hyperfunctionalization "extra muros" of a place of learning is equivalent to deterritorialization.
. something other than a "modernity": a hyperreality. a power of deterrence that. without a future." it loses the finality proper to it and becomes something else altogether: a polyfunctional nucleus. There.functions. to the loss of the function and of the finality of knowledge in a programmed neofunctional whole. an operationality on every level. a simultaneity of all the functions. culture) whose referential is lost. a new. And doubtless also crises. without a doubt constitutes their fundamental function: the hyperreality of functional nuclei that are no longer at all functional. Strange new objects of which the nuclear power station is without a doubt the absolute model and from which radiates a kind of neutralization of the territory. an ensemble of "black boxes" with multiple input-outputs.

1. into "antimedia" (pirate radio. and the mass media. Well. despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities. Despite efforts to reinject message and content. Or. In this case. it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. It is something else. or that it neutralizes them. dissuasive action of information. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. the media. outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly speaking. meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact. Consider three hypotheses. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning.THE IMPLOSION OF MEANING IN THE MEDIA We live in a world where there is more and more information. like the genetic code: it is what it is. it exhausts itself in the staging of
. Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Information is thought to create communication. a plus value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning. without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. and less and less meaning. as a whole. It devours communication and the social.just as consensus would have it that material production. A kind of code. there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two. meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be reinjected. that is. Or information has nothing to do with signification. Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor). Rather than producing meaning. The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. a general consensus would have it that nevertheless. And for two reasons. This is the whole ideology of free speech. a technical medium that does not imply any finality of meaning. the opposite occurs. and even if the waste is enormous. one must appeal to a base productivity to replace failing media. opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. but cannot make up for the brutal loss of signification in every domain. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving. the fact is that it is collapsing. which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social . It is the alpha and omega of our modernity. Rather than creating communication. it functions as it does. very much on the contrary.). In this case. We are all complicitous in this myth. there be an excess of meaning. Information devours its own content. and thus should also not be implicated in a value judgment. This is Shannon's hypothesis: a sphere of information that is purely functional. of media broken down into innumerable individual cells of transmission. an operational model of another order. to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification. there would simply be no significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning. as it does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. etc.

as a lure . this awakening dream of communication. the antitheater of communication. is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution. the mass media. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. to deterrence they respond with disaffection. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication.*1 Thus the media are producers not of socialization. on the contrary. to total entropy. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted. to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an end to the real). Thus not only communication but the social functions in a closed circuit. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay. the medium is the message. as one knows. Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social. but of exactly the opposite. there is none." More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content. or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends. The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. faith in information attach themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality." A sort of inverse simulation in the masses. Belief. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan's formula. One does not ask oneself. in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation. but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses. but. 2. The nondirective interview. listeners who call in. pirate radios.whatever the contents. but still. That means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium.that of simulation. to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. which. of the implosion of the social in the masses.meaning. the integrated circuit of the negative. A serious problem for all counterinformation. One both believes and doesn't. etc. this homeopathic grafting. It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum. Useless to ask which is the first term. that of the hyperreal. Only the medium can make an event . corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of communication in which this system encloses us. or with an always enigmatic belief. "I know very well. speech. that is how the real is abolished. More real than the real. it is a circular process . in each one of us. you are the event. Myth exists. But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was attached to myths in ancient societies. whether they are conformist or subversive. To this tautology of the system the masses respond with ambivalence.
. blackmail through speech: "You are concerned. participation at every level.to which the force of myth is attached. the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social.

Etymologically. one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of electronic mass media) . this is what implosion signifies. Strictly. But this is only the case in light of the idealism that dominates our whole view of information. it is the medium itself that is volatilized as such. there is perhaps still a subversive. of the reabsorption of every dialectic of communication in a total circularity of the model. the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message.and this is where McLuhan's formula leads. useless to dream of a revelation through form. which McLuhan himself did not see. the medium is the message. the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula. the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions. But one must realize that "catastrophe" has this "catastrophic" meaning of end and annihilation only in relation to a linear vision of accumulation. revolutionary use value of the medium as such. McLuhan's formula.the circularity of all poles . including that of the medium and of the real . Circularity of all media effects. because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable. it is still the message that lends credibility to the medium. of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other." Finally. It is useless to dream of revolution through content. Fundamentally. the medium also falls into the indefinite state characteristic of all our great systems of judgment and value. Without a message. We all live by a passionate idealism of meaning and of communication. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. the medium. it is truly the catastrophe of meaning that lies in wait for us. of the evanescence of the medium itself. One must envisage this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us. may seem catastrophic and desperate. simultaneously generates the message. A single model. Neither in content. and the "real. this very formula must be imagined at its limit where. The fact of this implosion of contents. of productive finality. of the absorption of meaning.
. there is. the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning.such is the alpha and omega of our modernity). but also the end of the medium. nor in form. Because beyond this neutralization of all content. the implosion of the medium itself in the real. That is .the sender is the receiver . distinct status as the intermediary of communication.thus the impossibility of any mediation. The absorption of one pole into another.there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium. Even the "traditional" status of the media themselves. imposed on us by the system. by an idealism of communication through meaning. which is the key formula of the era of simulation (the medium is the message . after all the contents and messages have been volatilized in the medium. in the same movement. is put in question. between one state of the real and another. of the implosion of the social in the masses. etc. characteristic of modernity.that is. whose efficacy is immediate. the term itself only signifies the curvature. that gives the medium its determined. pushed to its limit . But there is something even more serious.the end of panoptic and perspectival space . of a mediating power between one reality and another. If all the content is wiped out. from this perspective.antimedia. and.

a total claim to subjecthood. in short. But today? This absence of a response can no longer be understood at all as a strategy of power. nothing can control this process. and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses. free and conscious.but it suffices to get out of this ultimatum of meaning in order for the catastrophe itself to no longer seem like a final and nihilistic day of reckoning. of revolt. no logical resolution. there is the fascination that results from the neutralization and the implosion of meaning. such as it functions in our contemporary imaginary. how can one find a good use of the media . conforming objects. just as obstinately
. What then? Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses. there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed [informe] or informed [informée] masses. and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy. Beyond meaning." I analyzed and condemned the media as the institution of an irreversible model of communication without a response. there are the masses. in the violence perpetrated on meaning. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution." to an impassable horizon of meaning: beyond that nothing takes place that has meaning for us . insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction (cf. inert. he opposes all the practices of disobedience. The child resists on all levels.the challenge to meaning that comes from the media and its fascination. in the most complete ambiguity. or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them? Sometime ago. but simultaneously. obedient. There is no alternative to this. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind . To the demand of being an object. according to an absolutely Mobian and circular logic . What is essential today is to evaluate this double challenge the challenge of the masses to meaning and their silence (which is not at all a passive resistance) . Beyond the horizon of the social. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects. With one caution. they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system. but as a counterstrategy of the masses themselves when they encounter power. in "Requiem for the Media. they propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act. they are themselves terrorists. and to constitute themselves as submissive. responsible. of emancipation. The media carry meaning and countermeaning. or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media make themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends.and it is exactly like this. Evidently. To the demand of being a subject he opposes. Umberto Eco on this eternal moral dilemma: how can one not speak of terrorism. or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning. alternative efforts to revive meaning are secondary in relation to that challenge.the winding down to the bottom of a cycle that leads to what one could call the "horizon of the event. which result from the neutralization and the implosion of the social. All the marginal. they manipulate in all directions at once.there is none).exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world.

There also. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to returning to the system its own logic by doubling it. The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system. To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. emancipation. playing the game . exactly the opposite: childishness. expressing ourselves at whatever cost. do not see that they are going in the direction of the system. impact of all the object practices. total dependence. emancipation. but the latter was precisely a black box that neutralized the original virulence of the movement. * NOTE * 1. without absorbing it. For example: the information or knowledge that can be obtained about a system or an event is already a form of the neutralization and entropy of this system (to be extended to science in general. participating." indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses. producing. and even if we are still confronted with it. to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects. and without a doubt superior. But this is to ignore the equal. that is to say. But it would be enthralling to consider this hypothesis even within the parameters of cybernetic information theory. and to the social sciences and humanities in particular). but they do not respond at all to the other demand.precisely the practices of the masses . the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood.or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system. deciding. whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech. which is a form of refusal and of non-reception. passivity. Here we have not spoken of information except in the social register of communication. Information in which an event is reflected or broadcast is already a degradedform of this event. Do not hesitate to analyze the media's intervention in May 1968 in these terms. with an excess of meaning and organization. But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system. One should be wary of the universalization of struggles through information. even more serious today. All the movements that only play on liberation. hyperconformism. The extension of the student action permitted the general strike. of the word based on "consciousness raising. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word . One should be
. of the group.that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. of liberating ourselves. idiocy. of voting. and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and subversive. Amplification was itself a mortal trap and not a positive extension. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive . the maximum production of meaning. the fundamental thesis calls for this information to be synonymous with negentropy with the resistance to entropy.just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom. that of constituting ourselves as subjects. expression. Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today. speaking.and efficaciously. on the resurrection of a subject of history. because it was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails. But it would be useful to posit the opposite hypothesis: INFORMATION = ENTROPY. an object's resistance. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression. it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech. like a mirror. to reflecting meaning.a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other. of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning .

Every strategy of the universalization of differences is an entropic strategy of the system. of this simultaneously electronic and worldly solidarity.
.wary of solidarity campaigns at every level.

Triumph of superficial form. of their absolute advertising (of which professional advertising is. all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth. A sociality everywhere present. the social itself fell to the level of a "collective enterprise" securing its publicity on every level. whereas what is inherent to "weighty" enunciations. or commodities. of political men and parties with their "trademark image. separate at first. vaguely consensual (all the modalities are confused therein. a society therefore where the political economy. resolute. which is that of the superficial transparency of everything. it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. a vestige of sociality hallucinated on all the walls in
. but in an attenuated. progressively converge. has power over all the others. from one end to the other. any more than the rules of a game can be. becomes confused with this fascinating solicitation of an agitated language. in the accents of the sound track and in the multiple tonalities of the image track that is played everywhere before our eyes. More generally. A subsequent stage is crossed once the very language of the social. like a dream. to articulated forms of meaning (or of style) is that they cannot be translated into each other. This long movement toward translatability and thus toward a complete combinatorial. the form of advertising is one in which all particular contents are annulled at the very moment when they can be transcribed into each other. can be read in the vicissitudes of propaganda. their registers. issuing from the mass production of ideas. because the same language reigns in both. GROUND-ZERO ADVERTISING Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. triumph of entropy over all possible tropes. absorbed in a language without contradictions. The lowest form of energy of the sign. degree zero of meaning. literally speaking. All original cultural forms.ABSOLUTE ADVERTISING. only an episodic form). Both languages of the masses.but the form of advertising. that of a simplified operational mode. of the smallest common denominator of all signification. without a past. instantaneous form. present on walls. vaguely seductive. once the social turns itself into advertising. All current forms of activity tend toward advertising and most exhaust themselves therein. the kind that is produced as such . turns itself over to the popular vote by trying to impose its trademark image. without a future." Propaganda approaches advertising as it would the vehicular model of the only great and veritable idea-force of this competing society. is finally fully realized. without the possiblity of metamorphosis. Propaganda becomes the marketing and merchandising of idea-forces. This convergence defines a societyours-in which there is no longer any difference between the economic and the political. once again. Not necessarily advertising itself. That is to say dissolved as a specific power (as an historical mode of social contradiction). in the hot and bloodless voices of female radio announcers. because traversed by purely superficial intensities. See what surplus value of the social each advertisement tries to produce: werben werben (advertise advertise) .that is to say. agitated mode). also totally dissolved. after that of the political. The whole scope of advertising and propaganda comes from the October Revolution and the market crash of 1929. an absolute sociality finally realized in absolute advertising . the commodity and the mark. This unarticulated. From the historical destiny that it was.the solicitation of the social everywhere.

next to which the "conditioning" by advertising looks like a delightful change in fortune. equal distribution of all discourses that it proposes . it has both "entered into our customs" and at the same time escaped the social and moral dramaturgy that it still represented twenty years ago. and the image track that advertising. the commodity was its own publicity (there was no other) today publicity has become its own commodity. and deters them with this very equivalence). The sequence model. that of voting for itself at each moment. that is already putting an end to the reign of advertising. If at a given moment. It is not that people no longer believe in it or that they have accepted it as routine. That is what inspires fear. as an "asyntactic nebula. Dick's papula . equivalent rhetoric. The social as a script. digitality. the most interesting aspect of advertising is its disappearance. and thus of parodying itself. whose bewildered audience we are. a sort of broadcasting leech. It is confused with itself (and the eroticism with which it ridiculously cloaks itself is nothing but the autoerotic index of a system that does nothing but designate itself . it offers a simplified equivalence of all the formerly distinctive signs. signs. The anticipatory illustration of this transformation was Philip K. and what is thrilling. its dilution as a specific form. But the papula is still an intermediary form: it is already a kind of incorporated prosthesis. Thus the form of advertising has imposed itself and developed at the expense of all the other languages as an increasingly neutral.the model of the combinatory. Currently. an electronic parasite that attaches itself to the body and that is very hard to get rid of. by the magnetic tape. It is information. that will put an end to. Advertising is no longer (was it ever?) a means of communication or of information. It is that if its fascination once lay in its power to simplify all languages. The "thrill" of advertising has been displaced onto computers and onto the miniaturization of everyday life by computer science. A hybrid. Microprocessing." Yves Stourdze would say. since today advertising is no longer a stake. along with the other big media. This defines the limits of advertising's current power and the conditions of its disappearance. the sound track. without affects. but it still incessantly repeats advertising messages. cybernetic languages go much further in the direction of the absolute simplification of processes than advertising did on its humble still imaginary and spectacular-level. in the sense of data processing. but a prefiguration of the psychotropic and dataprocessing networks of the automatic piloting of individuals. today this power is stolen from it by another type of language that is even more simplified and thus more functional: the languages of computer science. or even as a medium. offers us .whence the absurdity of seeing in it an
.that transistorized advertising implant.the simplified form of a demand of the social that is immediately met by the echo of advertising. Or else it is overtaken by the madness specific to overdeveloped systems. signals.this still rhetorical continuum of sounds. precisely in its function of simulation. And it is because these systems go further that today they polarize the fascination that formerly devolved on advertising. which envelops us from every side (and which at the same time eliminates the hotly controversial problem of "belief" and efficacy: it does not offer signifieds in which to invest. by the electronic continuum that is in the process of being silhouetted against the horizon of the end of this century. slogans that it erects as a total environment is largely overtaken. then.

today retro in some sense. like ticker tape . because advertising is secretly condemned by the programmatic logic that will give rise to very different cities). the need for which makes itself rudely felt. that is to say of goods (eventually rare) and services just like the others. a mode of living or of survival (the social must be saved just as nature must be preserved: the social is our niche) .whereas formerly it was a sort of revolution in its very project. etc. just as one will be able to create advertising for the social. but saturated. one becomes diaphanous or rhizomic to escape the point of inertia . Folkloric dances in the metro. Advertising is the prefiguration of this: the first manifestation of an uninterrupted thread of signs. obstinate reminder of a social. I am concerned" . I consume. Superficial saturation and fascination." today repeats in other forms. that of proving the social while denying it."alienation" of the female body). the slogan "tomorrow I work" accompanied by a smile formerly reserved for leisure time. isolated in automatic pilot. It is in such a universe that what Virilio calls the aesthetic of disappearance gathers strength. I take pleasure.mirror of a paradoxical mockery.one is placed in orbit. computerized. the absolute advertising city (of the 1950s. "I buy. and you are at the crossroads. One need only look at Las Vegas. the transport track. autoregulated. One can thus create advertising for work. an uncontrollable chain reaction. true advertising lies therein: in the design of the social. a chain reaction of inertia. the joy of finding work. whose historical necessity has found itself absorbed by the pure and simple demand for the social: a demand that the social function like a business. that the following being to appear: fractal objects. I participate. one is geared down. all enveloped in the advertising track. for a long time. fundamentally saying and repeating incessantly. of the crazy years of advertising. one is plugged in. Everywhere there are three or four paths. I am present. the leisure track. fault zones that follow saturation.each isolated in its inertia. and that thus the question of "believing" in it or not is no longer even posed). a group of services.. just as work has passed from being a force antagonistic to capital to the simple status of employment. it has fallen into the register of supply and demand. in the fierce. of the abreaction or stupor of a society purely transparent to itself. and the advertising sequence for the election to the Prud-hommes (an industrial tribunal): "I don't let anyone choose for me" . and thus a process of massive rejection. advertising is completely in unison with the social. with a mocking liberty. the image track. Like the signs in advertising. The opposite panic: one knows that the social can be dissolved in a panic reaction. And. It is not by chance that advertising. in the exaltation of the social in all its forms. As a medium become its own message (which makes it so that now there is a demand for advertising in and of itself. one is satellized. one becomes transparent or uncountable. innumerable campaigns for security. today. Disaffected. mirror of the indifference of all public signification. fractal forms. "I vote. just as in life there is the work track. Desensitized. one that rang so spectacularly falsely. one is archived . When one sees Las Vegas
. after having. But it can also be dissolved in the opposite reaction. but ready to crack. This is certainly lost: the social has lost precisely this power of illusion. carried an implicit ultimatum of an economic kind.an Ubuesque slogan. which has retained the charm of that era.paths cross: there is the sound track. each microuniverse saturated. Because fascination remains.

it always had more than a subjugated function. accelerator of inertia. without the slightest suspicion of this caricatural exorbitance of all the functions of language. Le destructeur d'intensites (The Destroyer of Intensities) Advertising. hyperreal euphoria that we would not exchange for anything else. and return to the desert when dawn breaks.J. That is why. it was for a moment their glorious imaginary. from the mirror stage." Such is the message of what unites us.the referential function. and that it is this liquidation.rise whole from the desert in the radiance of advertising at dusk. effaces any support and any depth. . and. and all the architecture. with the same tired obscenity. therefore. and joins the best to the worst for a phantom of rationality whose formula is "Everyone must believe in it. because they function on the veritable operation of meaning. Where is the golden age of the advertising project? The exaltation of an object by an image. this reabsorption of everything into the surface (whatever signs circulate there) that plunges us into this stupefied. for their mockery and the collective spectacle of their game without stakes . to which neither linguistics nor semiology correspond. the allusion. the poetic function even. now. But the universe of the commodity is no longer this one: it is a world both saturated and in involution. Language allows itself to be dragged along by its double. that of a torn-up world. like all the procedures. it lost both its triumphal imaginary.that of the social and economic impact of publicity . because something else is happening there: a doubling of language (and also of images). and that is the empty and inescapable form of seduction. That is why advertising no longer has a territory. that is to say without any faith. fixing the disappearance of the religious in the orgasm of statues). And advertising is the illustration of this saturated and empty form. the unconscious). for its mockery. but an expanding one.always remains unresolved and fundamentally insoluble). effaces the streets. like information: destroyer of intensities. it was a mirror held out to the universe of political economy and of the commodity. how all of that is staged exactly like sex in pornography. it is what effaces the walls. L. it passed in some sense to the stage of mourning. Its recoverable forms no longer have
. the irony. the exaltation of buying and of consumption through the sumptuary spending of advertising? Whatever the subjugation of publicity to the management of capital (but this aspect of the question . it is useless to analyze advertising as language. In one blow.just as porno is a hypertrophied fiction of sex consumed in its mockery. a collective spectacle of the inanity of sex in its baroque assumption (it was the baroque that invented this triumphal mockery of stucco. "consumed" as one says in their mockery. See how all the artifices of meaning and of nonmeaning are repeated in it with lassitude. one sees that advertising is not what brightens or decorates the walls. all the mechanisms of the language of communication (the function of contact: you understand me? Are you looking at me? It will speak! . the facades. There is no longer a staging of the commodity: there is only its obscene and empty form. Bouttes. this opening onto an immense field of the mockery of signs. the game of words.

. like missiles are in atomic silos. and suddenly it is like a man who has lost his shadow. like archives are in bunkers. this wall lives without having wished to. black.here not even an amusing subterfuge. underground commuter train. beautiful gray. serving as a frame to the trompe l'oeil. once this sacred space was opened to the public.*2 was that it be immediately closed off to circulation and covered with a definitive shroud in order to keep this testimony to a civilization that has arrived. dull black-mineral underground space. these supergadgets simply demonstrate that our social monumentality has become advertising.-TRANS. The RER is a high-speed.the funereal luxury of a commodity buried. The commodity is buried. This shadow is beautiful because it is an allusion in contrast to the inferior world that has lost its shadow.-TRANS.white. .*1 which at least fooled the eye . Everything there is sepulchral . a cultural center: these strange objects. cause it to deteriorate irremediably (think of the waves of people from the RER) . in the end.any meaning. It is not the advertising of a particular person. in a black sun.an operation of publicitude. at the stage of the hypogee. open-air canvas.) All that one could hope for. as in the Lascaux caves. Total absence of fluids. now that it flees the sun. Gone the happy and displayed commodity. 2. A bunker-case-in deep. to bury its seductions and its artifices as if it were already consecrating them to another world. starting with the man of Tautavel passing through Marx and Einstein to arrive at Dorothee Bis . There is a fresco here that traces the long route traversed. * NOTES * 1. like information is in archives. there is no longer even a liquid gadget like the veil of water at Parly 2. at the same time that they discover a culture that chose to bury itself in order to definitively escape its own shadow. and for fear that pollution. is a gigantic advertising unit . (The only amusing idea in the whole thing is precisely the human and his shadow who walk in trompe l'oeil on the vertical dais of concrete: a gigantic. And it is something like the Forum that best illustrates what advertising has become. only pretentious mourning is staged. Thus the Forum des Halles closely resembles a funeral home . any more than Beaubourg is.Why not save this fresco from decomposition? Later the speleologists will rediscover it. what the public domain has become. intact. transparent. salmon marble. of the commodity. Sarcophagus of the commodity. snobbish. The Forum des Halles. in contrast to the family vault of haute couture and pret-a-porter that constitutes the Forum. the Forum also does not have the status of a veritable mall or architectural whole. for example. Parly 2 is a mall that was built in the 1970s on the outskirts of Paris. after having passed the stage of the apogee.
. of any firm.

which.what denies sexuality and wants to annihilate it.the one in which the strangeness and at the same time the intimacy of the subject to itself are played out (heimlich/ unheimlich) . the mirror image. that is to say of a critical and mortal form of reproduction?) and that. that is to say to want to realize. This is not always the case. the purest form of parentage. would push sexed beings to regress to a form of reproduction prior to sexuation (besides.CLONE STORY Of all the prostheses that mark the history of the body. Monocellular Utopia which. by way of genetics. because such a fantasy still passes through the figures of the mother and the father. death and the death drive . to change the game of the double from a subtle exchange of death with the Other into the eternity of the Same. In other words." the sole progenitor. which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again. isn't it this form of scissiparity. the perfect twin. a child was born a few months ago like a geranium: from cuttings. if not a death drive. The first born from a single cell of a single individual. Human cuttings ad infinitum. his "father. In the United States. and a pitted ovum. a transparency of the genetic inscription no longer even subject to the vicissitudes of procreation? Let's leave the death drive aside. but this support is ephemeral. but such copies only have the power of dreams. and are destroyed when one attempts to force the dream into the real. Is it a question of the phantasm of auto-genesis? No. because it finally allows one to do without the other. reremembered. sexuality being the carrier of life. materialize it in flesh and bone and.
. when it becomes visible. of which he would be the exact replica. and must have dreamed his whole life. It belonged to our era to wish to exorcise this phantasm like the others. allows complex beings to achieve the destiny of protozoas. all alteration of the Same in order to aim solely for the perpetuation of an identity. Clones. would push them metaphysically to deny all alterity. of a perfect duplication or multiplication of his being. to go from the same to the same (one still has to use the uterus of a woman. this reproduction and proliferation through pure contiguity that is for us. Cellular dream of scissiparity. at the same time. it signifies imminent death.*1 Dream of an eternal twining substituted for sexual procreation that is linked to death.rests on its immateriality. which haunts the subject like a subtle and always averted death. in a completely contrary way. the shadow. however: when the double materializes. The first clone child (the lineage of an individual via vegetal multiplication). What. just like the soul. never real. sexed parental figures that the subject can dream of effacing by substituting himself for them. But the double is precisely not a prosthesis: it is an imaginary figure. Everyone can dream. in the depths of our imaginary. The same is true of the (primal) scene of seduction: it only functions when it is phantasmed. the imaginary power and wealth of the double . the double. the double is doubtless the oldest. and in any case anonymous: a female prosthesis could replace it). each individual cell of an organism capable of again becoming the matrix of an identical individual. on the fact that it is and remains a phantasm. haunts the subject like his other. Cloning.

the clone is the materialization of the double by genetic means. but above all the joint act that is procreation. since this projection still passes through an image: the one in the mirror. a particular and sacred fascination of the Two. The Father and the Mother have disappeared. no more image . whereas thereby sex becomes useless . If all information can be found in each of its parts. in each of the dispersed fragments of the hologram. in which the subject is alienated in order to find himself again. No more medium.but precisely sex is not a function. with perhaps somewhat less definition. not in the service of an aleatory liberty of the subject. the whole loses its meaning. nor narcissistic reflection. that it is an indivisible configuration. No more mother. One is never the ideal or mortal mirage of the other. or rather it is parodied therein in a monstruous fashion. Which is combined with the economy of sexuality. the intertwining of their genes. that now infinitely "gives birth" based on a functional mode purged of all aleatory sexuality.but without denying the symbolic structure of procreation at all: becoming one's own child is still being someone's child. just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO. Whereas cloning enshrines the reiteration of the same: I + I + I + I. that is to say the abolition of all alterity and of any imaginary. it is what exceeds all the parts. of what is two together. The mirror stage is abolished in cloning. since identical duplication puts an end to his division. to which its sexuation is witness (paradox: cloning will fabricate sexed beings in perpetuity. One can speculate on the wealth of each of these vegetal branchings that in effect resolve all oedipal sexuality in the service of "nonhuman" sex. and if they can only be added. Delirious apotheosis of a productive technology. and never was one.it is still the case that it is no longer a question of the fantasy of auto-genesis. Whereas cloning radically abolishe's the Mother. since Gemini or Twins possess a specific property. in which the subject sees himself in order to die there. Neither child. and for the same reason. they can only be added to each other. Sex (or
.any more than an industrial object is the mirror of the identical one that succeeds it in the series. no more father: a matrix. nor twin. of sex through immediate contiguity and reduction . A segment has no need of imaginary mediation in order to reproduce itself. None of this occurs in cloning. since they are similar to their model. whose secret is precisely that it cannot be segmented into additional cells. of the immemorial and narcissistic dream of the subject's projection into his ideal alter ego. but in the service of a matrix called code. And it is the matrix. The cloner does not beget himself: he sprouts from each of his segments. of this singularity called body. It is no longer even a question of being twins. it is what makes a body a body. This is how one puts an end to totality. etc. seductive and mortal. but also the Father. the imbrication of their differences. It is also the end of the body. all the diverse functions of this body). or the one. it means that they are not sexually engendered and know nothing of death. The subject is also gone. that of the genetic code. any more than the earthworm needs earth: each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm. Just as each fragment of a hologram can again become the matrix of the complete hologram: the information remains whole. Cloning also retains nothing.

and micromolecular genetics is nothing but the logical consequence. then the DN A molecule. one can say that the genetic code. but through pure and simple renewal. according to Benjamin. it is the smallest undifferentiated element. at the direct level of the genetic code. its singular quality of the here and now. and. reduced to its abstract and genetic formula." From the point of view of cybernetics and computer science. around which this whole phantasmagoria is organized. the individual is destined to serial propagation. where the whole of a being is supposedly condensed because all the "information" of this being would be imprisoned there (there lies the incredible violence of genetic simulation) is an artifact. My genetic patrimony was fixed once and for all when a certain spermatozoa encountered a certain ovum. Because the genetic code is not "natural": just as every abstract and autonomized part of a whole becomes an artificial prosthesis that alters this whole by substituting itself for it (pro-thesis: this is the etymological meaning). begins the process of the analytic decomposition of the body. an operational prosthesis. Jacquard) Cloning is thus the last stage of the history and modeling of the body. It is thus theoretically possible to manufacture an individual identical to me starting with one of these cells. Well. A copy of this recipe is inscribed in each of the dozens of millions of cells that constitute me today. before being a cell of my liver or of my blood. If the prosthesis is commonly an artifact that supplements a failing organ. the one at which. It is the genetic formula inscribed in each cell that becomes the veritable modern prosthesis of all bodies. biophysioanatomical science. or the instrumental extension of a body. the one that will allow for the indefinite extension of this body by the body itself . from which will be able to emerge. Each of these cells knows how to manufacture me.death: in this sense it is the same thing) is what exceeds all information that can be collected on a body. each cell of a body becomes an "embryonic" prosthesis of this body. which contains all information relative to a body.at the nuclear level of the command cell. where is all this information collected? In the genetic formula. It is necessary to revisit what Walter Benjamin said of the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility. though at a much higher level of abstraction and simulation . no longer even through reproduction. identical beings assigned to the same controls. in its
.this body itself being nothing but the indefinite series of its prostheses. an abstract matrix. independent of sexuality and of death. in its aesthetic quality). by dissecting the body into organs and functions. A cybernetic prosthesis infinitely more subtle and still more artificial than any mechanical prosthesis. From a functional and mechanistic point of view. What is lost in the work that is serially reproduced. but "traditional. is the prosthesis par excellence. is its aura. Already. (Professor A. This heritage contains the recipe for all the biochemical processes that realized me and ensure my functioning. its aesthetic form (it had already lost its ritual form. it is a cell of me. This is why it must necessarily want to forge a path of autonomous reproduction. each organ is still only a partial and differentiated prosthesis: already simulation. it takes on.

as a stockpile of information and of messages. exotechnical. sexed reproduction still stood in opposition to this. but at the level of individuals. and of its vicissitudes. a political form. It is the irruption of technology that controls this reversal. But when one reaches a point of no return (deadend) in simulation. In fact this is what happens to the body when it ceases to be conceived as anything but a message. and in such a way that he can only reproduce himself identically to himself. photography. those that we know have been subdivided and internalized: esotechnical. the minimal formula to which an entire individual can be reduced. as fodder for data processing. which renders the generation of identical beings possible. though there is no possibility of a return to an original being. as soon as it is imposed on the body itself as the "original" model. which only a history itself nostalgic and retrospective can reconstitute as "authentic. is one in which the original no longer even exists. and one will be able to eliminate all the differential vicissitudes that once constituted the aleatory charm of individuals. they still returned to the body in order to modify its image .ineluctable destiny of reproduction. is interiorized in. are they anything other than a cancerous metastasis . of its history. As long as the prostheses of the old industrial golden age were mechanical. If all cells are conceived primarily as a receptacle of the same genetic formula .not only all the identical individuals. and contemporary mass media. no longer only at the level of messages. This is what happens to us with cloning." The most advanced. infiltrates the anonymous and micro-molecular heart of the body.the proliferation of the same cell such as occurs with cancer? There is a narrow relation between the key concept of the genetic code and the pathology of cancer: the code designates the smallest simple element.conversely. in its total consequences.genetic and mental software. since things are conceived from the beginning as a function of their unlimited reproduction.what are they but the
.a gigantic prosthesis that controlled the generation of objects and identical images. which Benjamin described in cinema. the only possible body the immutable repetition of the prosthesis. Thus nothing is opposed to the body being serially reproduced in the same way Benjamin describes the reproduction of industrial objects and the images of the mass media. in which nothing could be differentiated any longer from anything else . The individual is no longer anything but a cancerous metastasis of its base formula. Formerly. as a total medium. but all the cells of the same individual . The prostheses of the industrial age are still external. Cancer designates a proliferation ad infinitum of a base cell without taking into consideration the organic laws of the whole. There is a precession of reproduction over production. today one can finally isolate the genetic matrix of identity. All the individuals produced through cloning individual X. then it is the end of the body. We are in the age of soft technologies . What is lost is the original. a precession of the genetic model over all possible bodies. to the unchecked proliferation of a single matrix. that is to say when the prosthesis goes deeper. they themselves were metabolized in the imaginary and this technological metabolism was also part of the image of the body. It is the same thing with cloning: nothing opposes itself any longer to the renewal of the Same. burning all the previous symbolic circuits. the most modern form of this development.but still without imagining the current sophistication of this technology. but one still of the industrial age . of a technology that Benjamin was already describing.

is also its monstrous excrescence and negation. at this stage of plastic tactility. It is useless to ask oneself if cancer is an illness of the capitalist age. The stage of the body changes in the course of an irreversible technological "progression": from tanning in the sun.cancerous extension of this base formula? The metastasis that began with industrial objects ends with cellular organization. but where lies the truth of the body?) . endocrinal flows. * NOTES * One must take into account that cancerous proliferation is also a silent disobedience of the injunctions of the genetic code. without alterity without a mise en scéne. an exacerbated redundancy of the same cells. But what should be said of mental modeling via psychotropic agents and drugs? It is the stage of the body that is changed by them. either to others or to themselves. of mental malleability. of psychotropism at every level. body because it is connected only to its internal terminals. Cancer. It is the schema of the whole that is metamorphosed. a sensory. which already corresponds to an artificial use of the natural medium. suffices). The traditional prosthesis. a body metabolized directly. bodies that cannot be represented. because it is the very form of the virulence of the code: an exacerbated redundancy of the same signals. without transcendence. of the mirror. that is to say to making it a prosthesis of the body (itself becoming a simulated body. "Revolutionary" pathology of organic abandonment. it is simply definitively integrated. which serves to repair a failing organ.and finally to tanning by intervening in the genetic formula (an incomparably more advanced stage. without touching the world that surrounds it. without the mediation of the act or the gaze. mental. and of discourse. in Fictions ("Notes synoptiques a propos d'un mal mysterieux" [Synoptic notes on a mysterious illness]). that is. Entropic delirium of organisms. one passes by different bodies. Richard Pinhas would say. The psychotropic body is a body modeled "from the inside." blank sensoriality . an immanent body.disconnecting it from its own sensorial extremities. Organ transplants are still of this order.to tanning with pills and hormones (chemical and ingested prosthesis) . because it leads to total disinformation and to disaggregation." no longer passing through the per-spectival space of representation.) The same ambiguity is operative in cloning: it is at once the triumph of a controlling
. a body consecrated to the implosive metabolism of cerebral. already molecular (and no longer specular) body. but not sensible. a body already homogeneous. already close to nuclear and genetic manipulation. if it fits with the logic of a nuclear/computer science vision of human beings. changes nothing in the general model of the body. it no longer even passes through either the surface or the orifices of the body). (It is the same conjunction as that of the masses vis-a-vis structured social formations: the masses are also cancerous metastases outside any social organicity. apotheosis of a technology that has itself become interstitial and molecular. resisting the negentropy of informational systems. It is in effect the illness that controls all contemporary pathology. A silent. bodies enucleated of their being and of their meaning by being transfigured into a genetic formula or through biochemical instability: point of no return. but a prosthesis nonetheless.to domestic tanning with an iodine lamp (yet another good old mechanical technique) . and not to objects of perception (the reason why one can enclose it in a "white. that is to say to the absolute loss of the image.

-TRANS. it is probable (but this is left to a future story) that even the "clonic twin" will never be identical to its progenitor. will never be the same. despite everything.hypothesis. I. if only because it will have had another before it. And the cloning experiment will at least have the advantage of demonstrating the radical impossibility of mastering a process simply by mastering information and the code. that of the code and of genetic information." Millions of interferences will make of it. Note: A version of this essay with a different ending appeared under the title "The Hell of the Same" in Baudrillard's The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. D. It will never be "just like what the genetic code in itself would have changed it to. trans. Rorvik. James Benedict (London and New York: Verso. and an eccentric distortion that destroys its coherence. A son image: La copie d'un homme (In his image: The copy of a man) (Paris: Grasset. which is not new. 1978).
. Cf. who will have the very same blue eyes of its father. Besides. 1993). a different being.

In the hologram. in contrast to painting: instead of a field as a vanishing point for the eye. But this is in some sense the end of the aesthetic and the triumph of the medium. The hologram simply does not have the intelligence of trompe l'oeil. This is also characteristic of trompe l'oeil. it is the imaginary aura of the double that is mercilessly tracked. of passing through one's own spectral body . through allusion
. which. or photography was to take up the contents of painting. the side of the exact resemblance of the world to itself. The hallucination is total and truly fascinating once the hologram is projected in front of the plaque. which is one of seduction. of the subject to itself. and the opposite fascination.but not without consequences: having passed through the hologram has rendered your hand unreal as well. . neatly puts an end to the charm and the intelligence of music. The relief must leap out at you just as a tram car and a chess game would. Of course. it is the opposite temptation. at its most sophisticated limits. One must never pass over to the side of the real. This said. finally and especially of traversing oneself. suspending the real in the expiration of its double. the photograph) comes that of being able to circle around oneself.ever since Narcissus bent over his spring. so that nothing separates you from it (or else the effect remains photo. Because then the image disappears. through people. so its charm will be lost. you are in a reversed depth. as with the clone. Well. in order for a modicum of illusion and a stage of the imaginary to exist. which type of objects or forms will be "hologenic" remains to be discovered since the hologram is no more destined to produce three-dimensional cinema than cinema was destined to reproduce theater. The TV studio transforms you into holographic characters: one has the impression of being materialized in space by the light of projectors. you will have realized this miracle. the secret through the materialized projection of all available information on the subject. and finding Himself immaterially in the beyond. of the end of illusion. just as it is in the history of clones. After the fantasy of seeing oneself (the mirror. exactly as in stereo-phonia. eventually moving and talking. the stage.HOLOGRAMS It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues . like translucid characters who pass through the masses (that of millions of TV viewers) exactly as your real hand passes through the unreal hologram without encountering any resistance .or cinematographic). of always proceeding.and any holographed object is initially the luminous ectoplasm of your own body. according to the rules of appearances. which transforms you into a vanishing point . One must never pass over to the side of the double. through materialized transparency. and with it all seduction. . Surprising the real in order to immobilize it. it will no longer be a dream. Similitude is a dream and must remain one. We dream of passing through ourselves and of finding ourselves in the beyond: the day when your holographic double will be there in space. You bend over the hologram like God over his creature: only God has this power of passing through walls. because then the dual relation disappears. with the hologram.

there is no real: the third dimension is only the imaginary of a two-dimensional world. luminous clone. the social phantasmagoria. just as it is possible for you to pass through and beyond it. There is never similitude. the one of which we have always already dreamed (but these are only poor bricolages of it) gives us the feeling. the vertigo of passing to the other side of our own body. But which universe is this one? The hologram. is extracted by laser.) Three-dimensionality of the simulacrum . it is no longer an image at all . on the contrary. it is a bit more exact. and holographic reproduction. escapes its own double and its resemblance. obtained by the design of participating networks converging in emptiness under the spectral image of collective happiness. In any case. . perfect image and end of the imaginary. concentrated light. and in the same way no similitude possible in the order of figures. any more than there is exactitude. a secret dimension of everything. on the condition of remaining secret. which is no longer a visible or reflexive light. the universe is that of which there is no double. What is exact is already too exact. or. The hologram. what is exact is only what approaches the truth without trying. into fascination.the real medium is the laser. If.to and ellipsis of presence. is truly seductive. exaltation of the opposite movement: only what plays with one less dimension is true. Nothing resembles itself. and watches over us by anticipation. according to Mach. A historical moment: the hologram is now part of this "subliminal comfort" that is our destiny. but also of figures of art or of models of social or psychological relations). of your unconscious?) and whose secret form fed precisely your imaginary. the more evident it becomes (or rather to the evil spirit of incredulity that inhabits us. the first touches the other before the second. The double that hid in the depths of you (of your body. Laser/scalpel. Escalation in the production of a real that is more and more real through the addition of successive dimensions. there is no escape from this race to the real and to realistic hallucination since. but an abstract light of simulation. then with the hologram we are already virtually in another universe: which is nothing but the mirrored equivalent of this one. the fourth that of a three-dimensional universe . (The social. more evil still than the evil spirit of simulation) how everything escapes representation. It is somewhat of the same paradoxical order as the formula that says that as soon as two billiard balls roll toward each other. one touches the other before being touched. rather. which suddenly takes on all the force of evidence. no equivalent in the mirror. is now nothing but a special effect. is synthesized and materialized before you. It veers. quintessentialized. But. . to the side of the double. Or rather.why would the simulacrum with three dimensions be closer to the real than the one with two dimensions? It claims to be. which is that of passing to the side of the double. A luminous surgery whose function here is that of the double: one operates on you to remove the double as one would operate to remove a tumor. but paradoxically. or dead twin that is never born in our place. Which indicates that there is not even the possibility of simultaneity in the order of time. it has the opposite effect: to render us sensitive to the fourth dimension as a hidden truth. like all fantasies of
. on the other hand. it is not exactly like it. In short. The closer one gets to the perfection of the simulacrum (and this is true of objects. of this happiness now consecrated to the mental simulacrum and to the environmental fable of special effects. when an object is exactly like another.

is already no longer real. What happens on the other side of the truth. taken globally. renders it immediately pataphysical. The real. because it no longer has a reference. what does not have a possible complement in the mirror. but always already simulation value. truth. This is perhaps why twins were deified. or the universe. to lose itself there. much more destructive of the order of truth than its pure negation. will inevitably miss its object.pushed to its limit. all holographic extension (the fancy of exhaustively taking account of this universe) makes them surface in their mockery. because it does not take its shadow into account (precisely the reason why it does not resemble itself) . and plunges into transparency.
.this hidden face where the object crumbles. or to that of all the information on an individual in his genetic double (clone). It thus never has reproductive (truth) value. a weight of meaning. but in what is more true than the true. can eventually be calculated in exact terms. in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original. The holographic attempt literally jumps over its shadow. and thus to a pure non-meaning. in a restricted horizon. but a transgressive truth. Because they depend in some way on the hologram and on the objectivist whim of the deconstruction and exact reconstruction of the world (in its smallest terms) founded on a tenacious and naive faith in a pact of the similitude of things to themselves. or a mirror in which it can come to be reflected . its secret. Viewed at this angle. is already hyperreal. it is supposed to resemble itself like a face in a mirror . all passage to the limit. which is practically equivalent to that of all the dimensions of the real in its hyperreal double. what has no equivalence in meaning (it is as absurd to give it a meaning. and sacrileges. is what cannot be represented. of the potentialization of the real. that rests on it. Any classification or signification.the exact synthesis or resurrection of the real (this also goes for scientific experimentation). as to give it weight at all). partial effects of the mirror and of equivalence.and any attempt. not in what would be false. including the holographic one. but initially it appears absurd. and sacrificed. more real than the real? Bizarre effects certainly. Thus the weight of the world. even the exact sciences come dangerously close to pataphysics. Singular and murderous power of the potentialization of the truth. Meaning. the real cannot appear except locally. they are partial objects. any modality of meaning can thus be destroyed simply by logically being elevated to the nth power . Not an exact. it is as if all truth swallowed its own criteria of truth as one "swallows one's birth certificate" and lost all its meaning. The universe itself.and this virtual similitude is in effect the only definition of the real .this totalization. all generalization. that is to say already on the other side of the truth. the real object is supposed to be equal to itself. All doubling.

From Marx to McLuhan. but in the explosive vision of a body delivered to "symbolic wounds. to cutting. not in the pejorative illusion of a lost unity of the subject (which is still the horizon of psychoanalysis). wounds that are so many new sexual organs opened on the body. to the technical scar . Her mutilation and death became a coronation of her image at the hands of a colliding technology. excisions.neither an anatomy nor a physiology. the chasms of the body.a body without organs or pleasure of the organs. scarifications. which are not ours). all the metallurgy of the accident can be read in the semiurgy of the body . but the extension of death .no longer a functional medium. its pacified caricature) . On the other hand. media mediators of nature ideally destined to become the organic body of man. but a semiurgy of contusions. extensions. mutilations. (Pp. 189-90) Technology is never grasped except in the (automobile) accident. press his eyelids against the exposed tendon of her forefinger. the dorsal surface of his erect penis against the ruptured lateral walls of her vagina. gestures and skin tones. in the apocalyptic and baroque version of Crash*1 technology is the mortal deconstruction of the body . in the savage and continual surgery that violence exercises: incisions. touching them as he drove in a medley of stylized postures. the whole body becomes a sign to offer itself to the exchange of bodily signs. the same functionalist vision of machines and language: they are relays. of the complex of wounds that fused together her own sexuality and the hard technology of the automobile. Each would place his lips on those bleeding apertures.under the shining sign of a sexuality without a referential and without limits.CRASH From a classical (even cybernetic) perspective. that is to say in the violence done to technology itself and in the violence done to the body. It is the same: any shock. to the wounds of this minor actresss through the medium of his own motorcar.the dismemberment and cutting to pieces. Each of the spectators at the accident site would carry away an image of the violent transformation of this woman. In this "rational" perspective the body itself is nothing but a medium. technology is an extension of the body. lay his own nasal septum against the lesions of her left hand. But above all (as in primitive initiation tortures." of a body confused with technology in its violating and violent dimension. Each of them would join his own imagination. scars. a celebration of her individual limbs and facial planes. his grooves of erectile tissue. The automobile crash had made possible the final and longed-for union of the actress and the members of her audience. any blow. gathering the body as labor in the order of production is opposed to the dispersion of the body as anagram in the order of mutilation. of which the sexual wounds and pleasures of the body are only a particular case (and mechanical servitude in work. It is the functional sophistication of a human organism that permits it to be equal to nature and to invest triumphally in nature. the tender membranes of his mucous surfaces. Body and technology diffracting their
. In this way. Goodbye "erogeneous zones": everything becomes a hole to offer itself to the discharge reflex. any impact. entirely subjected to the mark.

irreversible figure. no psychology. No repressed unconscious (affects or representations). whereas the technology in Crash is shining. Everything is reversed. "a signifying machine" Deleuze would say. and from this results a sexuality without precedent . of crumpled fenders. and the Accident is everywhere. Seductive because denuded of meaning. seduction via the model.not even the opposite. of accidental signs that would only appear at the margins of the system. exactly the opposite . Death. who speaks in the introduction of a new perverse logic. Symbolic ritual of incision and marks. It is no longer the exception to a triumphal rationality. It is no longer at the margin. without metaphor. is no longer of the order of the neurotic. As Vaughan turned the car into a filling station courtyard the scarlet light from the neon
. no libido or death drive. as in sadism or masochism. it is the instigator of a new mode of nonperverse pleasure (contrary to the author himself.different from the Machine of The Penal Colony. toboggans. except in a second reading that would still reinject a forced meaning. that is the sex of life. Here. It is the Accident that gives form to life. No affect behind all that. like the graffiti on New York subways. highways. without sentences . but this is never. Thus one. it has become the Rule. one must resist the moral temptation of reading Crash as perversion). there are only incessant figures of circulation. it has devoured the Rule. via the interposed fetish. death and sex are read on the same level as the body. mutilations are no longer metaphors of castration. It is no longer even the "accursed share. Dysfunction is no longer possible in a universe of the accident . Another point in common: it is no longer a question. of this mixture of the body and of technology is immanent.a sort of potential vertigo linked to the pure inscription of the empty signs of this body.the residual bricolage of the death drive for the new leisure classes. the elementary. is still puritan. with an express and perverse aim of violence. Carnal abstraction and design. based on the psychoanalytic model. The car is not the appendix of a domestic. And the automobile. it is the Accident. seductive. The non-meaning. of sheet iron stained with sperm.therefore no perversion is either. without phantasms.bewildered signs through each other. And Vaughan's body is in its turn the mirror of bent chrome. seduced. of a strategic organization of life that starts from death. repressive. Kafka's machine. or via the medium of language. immobile universe. the savagery. the magnetic sphere of the automobile. death is implicated in an unlimited exploration of the possible violence done to the body. a distortion of meaning and of sex (in relation to what?). the banality of the anomaly of death. inextricable. in Crash. exchangers. Only the fetishistic metaphor is perverse. the insane. wounds. which ends by investing the entire universe with its tunnels. the residual or the transgressive. it is at the heart. the repressed. is nothing but the immense metaphor of life." the one conceded to destiny by the system itself. it is the immediate reversion of one to the other. The Accident is no longer this interstitial bricolage that it still is in the highway accident . or dull and innocent. its mobile dwelling as universal prototype. Naturally. there is no longer a private and domestic universe. no flux or desire. Bodies and technology combined. where the body in its wounds is still only the support of a textual inscription. The Accident. like death. and included in its general reckoning. and because it is the simple mirror of torn-up bodies.

(P. These unions of torn genitalia and sections of car body and instrument panel formed a series of disturbing modules. Sex as we know it is nothing but a minute and specialized definition of all the symbolic and sacrificial practices to which a body can open itself. The savages knew how to use the whole body to this end. through the simulacrum. sex. like the scarifications of savages. all the breaches through which the body is reversibilized and. Headlamps flared above us as the stream of cars moved up the slope of the overpass. In the rear-view mirror I could still see Vaughan and the girl. jocularly talking to her about her body. injuries to male and female genitalia caused by steering wheel shrouds. but through artifice. initiation sexuality was only one of the possible metaphors of symbolic exchange. his penis entering her vagina again. Sex is nothing but this rarefaction of a drive called desire on previously prepared zones. . above a close-up of a massively bruised vulva was a steering-wheel boss and its manufacturer's medallion. nipples sectioned by manufacturers' dashboard medallions. no longer though nature. Now. the sexual act between Vaughan and this young woman took place in the hooded grottoes of these luminescent dials. their bodies lit by the car behind. . it is something else. .for itself and for others . A succession of photographs of mutilated penises. In the chromium ashtray I saw the girl's left breast and erect nipple. through the accident. Only the wounded body exists symbolically . neither the most significant. each scar left on the body is like an artificial invagination. in tattooing. like certain topological spaces. windshields during ejection . the few natural orifices to which one usually attaches sex and sexual activities are nothing next to all the possible wounds. it is no longer sex. all the artificial orifices (but why "artificial"?). 134) Each mark. Vaughan lifted the young woman astride him. itself. moderated by the surging needle of the speedometer. It is largely overtaken by the fan of symbolic wounds. each trace. In several of the photographs the source of the wound was indicated by a detail of that portion of the car which had caused the injury: beside a casualty ward photograph of a bifurcated penis was an inset of a handbrake unit. nor the most prestigious.sign over the portico flared across these grainy photographs of appalling injuries: the breasts of teenage girls deformed by instrument binnacles. which is in some sense the ana-grammatization of sex on the whole length of the body . units in a new currency of pain and desire. is nothing but the inscription of a privileged signifier and some secondary marks nothing next to the exchange of all the signs and wounds of which the body is capable. In a triptych of images reflected in the speedometer. the clock and revolution counter. the partial mamoplasties ."sexual desire" is never anything but the possiblity bodies have of combining and exchanging their signs. as it has become for us in its obsessional and realistic reference. . sectioned vulvas and crushed testicles passed through the flaring light as Vaughan stood by the girl filling-station attendant at the rear of the car. rotated his hips and inserted his penis in her vagina.but now precisely. reflected in the black trunk of the Lincoln and a hundred points of the interior trim. The jutting carapace of the instrument panel and the stylized
. In the vinyl window gutter I saw deformed sections of Vaughan's thighs and her abdomen forming a bizarre anatomical junction. which are always a vehement response to the absence of the body. As the car travelled for the first time at twenty miles an hour Vaughan drew his fingers from the girl's vulva and anus. no longer knows either interior nor exterior. thanks to its organic and functional character (including in orgasm). torture.

and homogenized by the only technique. his hands splaying her buttocks to reveal her anus as the yellow light filled the car. but a functional language: the adequation of chrome and mucous as of one form to another. pleasure is only orgasm. X imprints the car wrecks with his sperm. down the entire length of Western Avenue. Besides. Pleasure (whether perverse or not) was always mediated by a technical apparatus. enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star. No ass. driving his penis into her vagina. We had entered an immense traffic jam. Brake-lights flared in the evening air. but of pure and simple discharge.it always implies an intermediary manipulation of scenes or gadgets. The enormous energy of the twentieth century. it is not a question of orgasm. Vaughan sat with one arm out of the passenger window. pounding the panel with his fist. The passengers at the windows resembled rows of the dead looking down at us from the galleries of a columbarium. that is to say no intimacy of sexual violence. windshields bleaching out the molten colours of the sun setting above the western suburbs of London. stretched an immense congestion of traffic held up by the accident. To our right the high wall of a double-decker airline coach formed a cliff of faces. glowing in the huge pool of cellulosed bodies. the vulva. Vaughan's strongpelvic spasms coincided with the thudding passage of the lamp standards anchored in the overpass at hundred-yard intervals. 151) Around me. the rectum. I felt completely at ease. another dimension is inseparable from the confused ones of technology and of sex (united in a work of death that is never a work of mourning): it is that of the photograph and of cinema. by a mechanism of real objects but more often of phantasms . even metaphorically speaking. that is to say. They are nothing but signatures .in the final scene. Her sharp breasts flashed within the chromium and glass cage of the speeding car. as if my obsessions with the endlessly multiplying vehicles had at last been relieved. He slapped the door impatiently. one summed up by a single object: the automobile. was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause. The shining and saturated surface of traffic and of the
. Standing at the centre of this paralysed hurricane. From the junction of the motorway and Western Avenue to the ascent ramp of the flyover the traffic lanes were packed with vehicles. (P. no dick. along both ramps of the flyover. coitus. no cunt but: the anus. (R 143) Here. confused on the same wave length with the violence of the technical apparatus. As I propelled the car at fifty miles an hour along the open deck of the overpass Vaughan arched his back and lifted the young woman into the full glare of the headlamps behind us. 156) Yet in Crash. As each one approached his hips kicked into the girl. And the coitus and sperm that traverse the book have no more sensual value than the filigree of wounds has violent meaning.sculpture of the steering column shroud reflected a dozen images of her rising and falling buttocks. No slang. (P. Here. The same goes for the correspondence of death and sex: it is more as if they are covered together in a sort of technical superdesign than articulated according to pleasure. the penis. all the erotic terms are technical.

The photographic film (like transistorized music in automobiles and apartments) is part of the universal. the functionalism of Crash devours its own rationality. In front of him.all are simultaneous in a universe where the anticipation of the event coincides with its reproduction. The two vehicles veered sideways towards the line of startled spectators. No more temporal depth either . It is a radical functionalism that reaches its paradoxical limits and burns them. windshield and roof had been crushed by the impact.just like the past. the lopsided family lurched across each other. There was a violent metallic explosion as the motorcycle struck the front of the saloon car. But in fact. the sound of the metering coils skating along the grass beside the rail. nodding encouragingly as if urging a child across some mental hurdle. it is the eye of the camera that is substituted for time. the onrushing air lifting his chin. it simply signfies that this universe is without secrets. Inside the cabin. But at the same time. their expressions equally vacant. The bonnet." (Pp. The photo is no more of a medium than technology or the body . sex. large synchronous machine. . then careened across the roof in a black mass of fragments." that is to say itself always already captured. in the incessant figures of traffic. It is not another dimension. and death. the family of four mannequins sat in their vehicle. indeed with its "real" production. Shavings of fibreglass from its face and shoulders speckled the glass around the test car like silver snow. that of affect.accident is without depth. Helen Remington held my arm. the future ceases to exist in turn. everything is hyperfunctional. as the motorcycle and its driver sailed over the bonnet of the car and struck the windshield. At once it again becomes an indefinable. space.
. nor of a spectacular compulsion. a death confetti. It is not a question of a "supplementary" abstraction of the image. because it does not know dysfunction. and Vaughan's position is never that of the voyeur or the pervert. Their faces were marked with cryptic symbols. This universe would be nothing without this hyperreal disconnection. I regained my balance. a crash meticulously simulated and refined over a period of months) occurs outside a cinematographic take. "We can have a look at it again on the Ampex. It came to rest astride the rails. They're showing it in slow-motion. The car plunged ten feet back on its hawsers. where the commodity becomes "hypercom-modity. She smiled at me. but it is always doubled in Vaughan's camera lens. Only the doubling. since traffic and accident. In fact. just as it is for any other depth. 12425) In Crash. the decapitated torso of the front-seat woman passenger embedded in the fractured windshield . the unfolding of the visual medium in the second degree can produce the fusion of technology. the photograph here is not a medium nor is it of the order of representation. The lens stockpiles and hoards accident photos like dossiers. A harsh whipping noise came toward us. It is the same universe as that of the hypermarket. technology and death. sex and simulation are like a single. language. His hands were shackled to the handlebars like a kamikaze pilot's. . The mannequin rider sat well back. The general repetition of the crucial event that it foments (his automobile death and the simultaneous death of the star in a collision with Elizabeth Taylor. and corporeal layer of traffic and flows. and the whole atmosphere with it. involuntarily holding Vaughan's shoulder. metallized. His long thorax was plastered with metering devices. hyperreal.

it becomes all of a sudden an object at the crossroads. Straus and Giroux. as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers. but one which. speaks of the "warning against that brutal. and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist we had observed with the most unlikely partners. In Crash. J. It is simply fascinating. it is hyperreality that abolishes both. and to parody Littre in a pataphysical mode. this chromatic world and metallic intensity. They stepped into a beach buggy slashed with pennants and yellow paint and drove off. An adolescent girl in a denim suit walked past us. Few books. Neither good nor bad: ambivalent. a hand on her buttocks. as if neutralized. G.-TRANS. appears as if traversed by an intense force of initiation.a symbolic universe. erotic machinery). The last of the amublances drove away. though this fascination does not imply a value judgement. Clockwork Orange. which it projects in the future along the same lines of force and the same finalities that are those of the normal universe. There lies the miracle of Crash. but one void of sensuality. no more fiction or reality. this dull splendor of banality or of violence. erotic. its siren wailing. "a path leading nowhere. full of violated and violent bodies. it becomes a path leading more quickly than the main road.that is to say. and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape"*2). this violently sexed world. After Borges. the one with which we will all now be concerned . A burly man in a truck-driver's jacket helped his wife up the embankment. in the introduction. concrete.the critical judgment that is still part of the functionality of the old world. car. He held her right breast with the back of his hand. but leading there faster than the others. or leading where the main road does not lead or. 1973). her young man with an arm around her waist. Like death or fashion. Not even a critical regression is possible. horn hooting eccentrically. but in another register. There fiction surpasses reality (or the opposite). This mutating and commutating world of simulation and death. no longer is at all . The spectators returned to their cars. Crash (New York: Farrar. even contested. This introduction first appeared in the French edition published in Paris by ClamannLevy in 1974. or climbed the embankment to the break in the wire fence. 2. stroking her nipple with his knuckles. Nashville.is it good or bad? We will never know. hypertechnology without finality . Crash is hypercriticism (there also in contrast to its author who. better yet. object. Ballard.therefore fascinating. Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation. (R 157) * NOTES * 1. few films reach this resolution of all finality or critical negativity. whereas good old functionalism. Nowhere does this moral gaze surface . but according to the same rules of the game. through a sort of reversal of the mass-mediated substance (neon. but one without desire." This is what distinguishes Crash from all science fiction or almost all. This pervasive sexuality filled the air.
. which most of the time still revolves around the old couple function/dysfunction.

) This projection is totally reabsorbed in the implosive era of models. but in any case the dissociation from the real world is maximized. but it is not qualitatively different from it. they no longer constitute the imaginary in relation to the real. simulacra that are productive. What happens when this distance.total operationality. and thus leave no room for any sort of fictional anticipation . To the potentially infinite universe of production. founded on information. The models no longer constitute either transcendence or projection. even in unconscious structures. and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature made in God's image. of this gap that leaves room for an ideal or critical projection. Projected hypostasis of the robot. its materialization by the machine and in the whole system of production . founded on the image.is there an imaginary that might correspond to this order? The most likely answer is that the good old imaginary of science fiction is dead and that something else is in the process of emerging (not only in fiction but in theory as well). metallurgy. aim of total control. in which a transcendent sphere. There is no real. This projection is maximized in the Utopian. there is no imaginary except at a certain distance. and thus leave no
. and power increase to the nth power. founded on energy.a Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion. a radically different universe takes form (the romantic dream is still the individualized form of Utopia. optimistic. To the first category belongs the imaginary of the Utopia. (To the limited universe of the preindustrial era. speed. To the third corresponds . of an indefinite liberation of energy (desire belongs to the Utopias related to this order of simulacra). the tendency is certainly toward the reabsorption of this distance. science fiction adds the multiplication of its own possibilities. from one order of simulacra to another. Mechanical or energetic extensions. the island of Utopia stands opposed to the continent of the real). productivist. The same wavering and indeterminate fate puts an end to science fiction . but the schemas and the scenarios are those of mechanics. To the second corresponds science fiction. the model. that are harmonious. as specific genres.but also to theory. on imitation and counterfeit. they are themselves an anticipation of the real. force. to be reabsorbed on behalf of the model? Well. etc. strictly speaking. tends to abolish itself. simulacra of simulation. hyperreality. in which transcendence is outlined in depth. alternative universe. Utopia opposed an ideal.SIMULACRA AND SCIENCE FICTION Three orders of simulacra: simulacra that are natural. including that between the real and the imaginary. the cybernetic game .they are immanent. naturalist. This projection is greatly reduced in science fiction: it is most often nothing other than an unbounded projection of the real world of production.

mental.something else takes place. besides. Dick. hypostatized in space .a universal market. Thus in Simulacra by Philip K. in a world dominated by the reality principle. There is no relationship of cause and effect there: it is not because terrestrial space today is virtually coded. in a world controlled by the principle of simulation. Perhaps science fiction from the cybernetic and hyperreal era can only exhaust itself. emptied of meaning. can only try to reconstruct in vitro. in its artificial resurrection of "historical" worlds. Until now we have always had a reserve of the imaginary . or to transferring it into a hyperreal of simulation. There is a hemorrhaging of reality as an internal coherence of a limited universe. of the manipulation of these models at every level (scenarios.the
. The imaginary was the alibi of the real. paradoxically. registered. Reality could go beyond fiction: that was the surest sign of the possibility of an everincreasing imaginary. We can no longer imagine any other universe: the grace of transcendence was taken away from us in that respect too. And. signs. the setting up of simulated situations. and thus one available to the imaginary. but hallucinatory with retrospective truth.now the coefficient of reality is proportional to the reserve of the imaginary that gives it its specific weight. But the real cannot surpass the model . has thus in a sense closed up again in universalizing itself . in the imaginary as well.it is nothing but its alibi. the ideologies of the past. The every-dayness of the terrestrial habitat itself elevated to the rank of cosmic value. of their original process. the war of Secession. The field opened is that of simulation in the cybernetic sense. that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a lost object.but a Utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible. it is the real that has become the alibi of the model. But the two are narrowly linked.room for any kind of imaginary transcendence. the perimeters of a prior world. that is. a reversal is produced . This is also true of geographic and spatial exploration: when there is no longer any virgin territory. once the limits of this universe recede into infinity. it forged its path in the narratives of spatial exploration. In this way. Witness this two-bedroom/kitchen/shower put into orbit. when the map covers the whole territory. the conquest of space constitutes an irreversible crossing toward the loss of the terrestrial referential. etc. counterparts to the more terrestrial forms of exploration and colonization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. it is the real that has become our true Utopia . down to the smallest details. but a desperate rehallucination of the past. something like the principle of reality disappears. mapped. but of values.) but then nothing distinguishes this operation from the operation itself and the gestation of the real: there is no more fiction. and they are two versions of the same general process of implosion that follows the gigantic process of explosion and expansion characteristic of past centuries. the events. cosmic) of science fiction has also ceased to function. Classical science fiction was that of an expanding universe. Today. not only of merchandise. in which fiction will never again be a mirror held toward the future. raised to a spatial power (one could say) with the most recent lunar module. models.it is not exactly because of this that the exploratory universe (technical. the people. saturated. leaving no room for the imaginary . When a system reaches its own limits and becomes saturated. The conquest of space that follows that of the planet is equal to derealizing (dematerializing) human space. Gigantic hologram in three dimensions.

nothing in it is "invented": everything in it is hyper-functional. In this way. This is what distinguishes Crash from almost all science fiction. a projection. a diffusion of all coordinates (mental. which mostly still revolves around the old (mechanical and mechanistic) couple function/ dysfunction. Dick "gravitate" in this space. disorienting. which is no longer an other.one is from the start in a total simulation. And not because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra science fiction has always done so. From then onward. a double universe. one is always already in the other world. without a future. technique and death. the extrapolation. but reconstituted.it is a universe of simulation. or a Utopia that can reflect it . impossible. attempting to revitalize. the end of science fiction . brought to light with a transparent precision. on doubling or redoubling. hyperrealized. quite the contrary. of the quotidian. the imaginary from the givens of the real. up to Crash. the sort of pantographic excess that constituted the charm of science fiction are all impossible. synchronous. of the banal. immanent. the end of the phantasm. Crash is our world. Perhaps a still more convincing example would be that of Ballard and of his evolution from the first very "phantasmagoric" short stories. both the circulation and the accident. whereas here the double has disappeared. blended and hyperoperational in the void. it is around the hole of the real. temporal. because this new universe is "antigravitational.it is the end of metaphysics. or a galactic prowess there . be the opposite: it will be to put decentered situations. without a mirror. reconstituted as an animal or vegetal reserve. precisely because it has disappeared from our life. without a past. without origin. derealized in advance. or even a possible universe .neither possible. sex and photographic lens. which is without a doubt (more than IGH or Concrete Island) the current model of this science fiction that is no longer one. something must change: the projection. requotidianize fragments of simulation. but. around the hole of the imaginary). signaletic) . models of simulation in place and to contrive to give them the feeling of the real. without exteriority . if one can use that word (but that is precisely what one can't really do any more. dreamlike. this situational reversion? Obviously the short stories of Philip K. Where would the works be that would meet.simulation is insuperable. neither real nor unreal: hyperreal .it is not about a parallel universe. of lived experience. but it played on the double. It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real. a cosmic folklore or exoticism. either artificial or imaginary. it would evolve implosively in the very image of our current conception of the universe.the era of hyper-reality begins." that was still the golden age of transcendence. simulated machine: that is to say the acceleration of our own models. to reinvent the real as fiction. this situational inversion. spatial. everything in it is like a giant.we will no longer even pass through to "the other side of mirror. One does not see an alternative cosmos. Hallucination of the real. unsurpassable." or if it still gravitates. reactualize. science fiction would no longer be a romantic expansion with all the freedom and naivete that the charm of discovery gave it. The process will. of lived experience. poetic. dull and flat. there is no longer a double. but without substance. of all models that surround us. which is something else altogether. sometimes down to disquietingly strange details. which it projects into the future along the
. fragments of this universal simulation that have become for us the so-called real world. here and now.satellization of the real in the transcendence of space . rather.

exposing the productive genie of the simulacra of the second order: the computer does not come into play as a process of simulation. computers.simulacra. science fiction in this sense is no longer anywhere. depend on the third order. in the complex universe of science fiction. that of "serious" factories. It is there that our contemporary science fiction.same lines of force and the same finalities that are those of the "normal" universe. but on the contrary the lack of distinction between the two. the most difficult thing today. Thus one can clearly mark the difference between the mechanical robot machines.. And one can see that it is not necessary to invent it: it is there. "Jack Barron or Eternity".
. and what already comes from this vagueness of the imaginary. without depth. here and now. What writer of science fiction would have "imagined" (but precisely it can no longer be "imagined") this "reality" of East German factories . characteristic of the second order. But only the last order can still truly interest us. if there is one. aleatory. exists. from the inertia itself of the operational world. of this uncertainty proper to the third order of simulation. productive of power and energy) that corresponds to the second order. etc. in the circulation of models.hyperreality abolishes both. like the computer from 2001 or Shalmanezer in Everyone to Zanzibar). between one factory and another. the "grand opera" of technique) that corresponds to the first order. that. in the very principle of the surrounding simulation. What is fascinating here is not the opposition between real factories and fake factories. but precisely that they are real. to the same hyperreality. of the productive/projective order. there is neither fiction nor reality anymore . in their governing principle. and it still bears witness to the reflexes of a finalized universe (including ambivalence and revolt. and the cybernetic machines. productive status. some passages from "Everyone to Zanzibar". It is this hyperreal indifference that constitutes the real "science-fictional" quality of this episode. But one order can certainly contaminate another. a superrobot. That is simulation: not that the factories are fake. and that because of this they return all "real" production. whose activity is consumed in a game of orders. and the computer can certainly function as a mechanical supermachine. and it is everywhere. all interference can still be produced today at the level of science fiction. In Crash. factories that reemploy all the unemployed to fill all the roles and all the posts of the traditional production process but that don't produce anything. In fact. Without a doubt. uncertain status of "metatechnique") that corresponds to the third order. the operative (the industrial. of writing. Fiction in that universe might surpass reality (or the opposite: that is more subtle) but it still plays by the same rules. hyperreal. emerging from a world without secrets. of bookkeeping. the fact that all the rest of production has no greater referent or deeper finality than this "simulacra!" business. putting its own unemployed out of work a second time). a superpower machine. is to unravel what still complies (and a large part still does) with the imaginary of the second order. It can emerge in its crude state. and the operational (the cybernetic. of competition. Between the operatic (the theatrical status of theatrical and fantastical machinery. inside a vast network? All material production is redoubled in the void (one of these simulacra factories even "really" failed.

Thus confession restored a reassuring causality. The antibodies lose their efficacy. the females become sterile. and torture. they become coprophagous and sterile. Otherwise.do not exist. the least heresy would have rendered all of divine creation suspect. July 1973 Rabbits develop a morbid anxiety.THE ANIMALS: TERRITORY AND METAMORPHOSES What did the torturers of the Inquisition want? The admission of evil. The hysteria of chickens infects the whole group. in rockets. with experimental ferocity in the name of science. All the aspects of the modern treatment of animals retrace the vicissitudes of the manipulation of humans. Experimentation is thus not a means to an end. bestiality . Gathered at a convention in Lyons.in this sense we are all animals. The rabbit is "anxious. savagery . It was necessary to make the accused say that he was not guilty except by accident. European veterinarians became concerned about the diseases and psychological troubles that develop in industrial breeding farms. Bestiality. to parasites. through the incidence of the principle of Evil in the divine order. precisely in their silence." "maladapted" from birth. whom one continually tests in order to extort their reflex behaviors. It does not found an intelligibility. A confession whose apparent distances . from experimentation to industrial pressure in breeding. when we use and abuse animals in laboratories. -Science and the Future. mortality increases. of the principle of evil. the most abnormal are resolved in science. Everywhere bestiality must yield to reflex animality. animals have remained the incarnation for us. Animals must be made to say that they are not animals. of which. radical strangeness to reason . and its principle of uncertainty. it extorts a confession from science as previously one extorted a profession of faith. a "psychic" collective tension that can reach a critical threshold: all the animals begin to fly and scream in all directions. of the savage. The
. This proof. were nothing but the triumphal coronation (neither sadistic nor expiatory) of the fact of having produced Evil as cause. and laboratory animals. Spontaneously. exorcising an order of the indecipherable. madness. as before that of divine reason. of which it secretly despairs. etc. and the extermination of evil through torture. so it seems. must be killed in animals. Animals have thus preceded us on the path of liberal extermination. what confession are we seeking to extort from them from beneath the scalpel and the electrodes? Precisely the admission of a principle of objectivity of which science is never certain. if one can say so. In the same way. that bestiality. but on the contrary the most bestial behaviors. must be continually redone and everywhere redone . Greater sensitivity to infections. it is a contemporary challenge and torture.with what these terms imply of unintelligibility. in physiological mechanisms.illness. which are like so many confessions of rationality in the final moment. in cerebral connections.are nothing but a provisional crack in the transparency of causality. the most singular.

A zoo psychiatry becomes necessary." "normality. it is now necessary to be always concerned with the mental equilibrium of the animals.. innovating and reinventing the "quality of work. sometimes even unto death." In any case. the capitalist "breeders" were led to a revision that was destructive of the mode of exploitation. . except suicide.the pecking order. it certainly seems that the only remedy is space . there is a collapse.line factories is illuminating. In the logic of reflex behaviors and
.. The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value and humans sick from industrial concentration. nothing works. These resistances are a failure of industrial reason (drop in profits). myocardial infarction in mice. Good example of absurdity: one knows the analogous ravages of good democratic intentions in tribal societies. and a lot of the problems observed would disappear. to the country. gadgets. Cannibalism on the part of pigs. One thus wished to break the pecking order and democratize access to food through another system of distribution. the last in the order is never able to get to the food. The animals wound themselves. Only the inevitability of death renders the example of the animals more shocking still than that of men on an assembly line.. like people."a bit more space. this drop in profitability may lead the breeders to return the animals to more normal living conditions. Failure: the destruction of this symbolic order brings along with it total confusion for the birds. chickens! In conclusion. A psychic life of frustration represents an obstacle to normal development. no other possible defiance. All the anomalies described are suicidal. the animals take refuge in the corner." "One cannot simply do whatever one wants with nature. In birds there is a hierarchy of access to food . At the first shock. general terror. to restore their mental equilibrium." He is thus satisfied with this conference: "The current concern about the fate of bred animals is witness. Against the industrial organization of death. from the scientific organization of work and assembly . tranquilizers. . Animals somatize! Extraordinary discovery! Cancers." The problems having become serious enough to damage the profitability of business." And he foresees the time when one will send animals. the author says. In these conditions of overpopulation. red light." "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability. gastric ulcers. "In order to be raised in a healthy manner.crisis over. animals have no other recourse. mute and as if paralyzed. and a chronic instability. "It is certainly necessary to establish that bred animals suffer psychically. It can last several weeks. to the alliance of the morality and the meaning of a well ." the "enrichment of tasks. In the latter case as well. the crisis begins again. "the fate of these animals would become less miserable. once again. One attempted to give them tranquilizers ." discovering the "human" sciences and the "psycho-sociological" dimension of the factory. pigs. but also one senses that they run counter to the logical reasoning of the specialists.understood interest. The calves begin to lick everything that surrounds them. One has never said better how much "humanism." Darkness..

which still continues. the one that permits the liquidation of species even as they are archived as specimens in the African reserves or in the hell of zoos . to answer for their psychic life and the misdeeds of their unconscious. they are summoned to respond to the interrogation of science. With ingenuity. they have become the meat of industry.the whole covered by a racist sentimentality (baby seals. An objective animal "reign" has only existed since Man has existed. The worker also needs responsibility. in our place. neurosis. an irrational and derailed psychic life. but to restore the principle of mutually agreed upon equivalences. given over to liberal and humanist therapy. but the abyss that separates them today. like a new and unexplored scientific field.of the animal . the psychic life of the animal as soon as he is revealed to be maladapted to the death one is preparing for him. this abyss that separates them follows domestication. Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his "rational" behaviors. Brigitte Bardot). of fattening to death (the animals). they are now made to speak the "psy" language. Everything is blocked. will have coincided with the impossibility of a rational socialization in every domain. Beasts of burden. these anomalies are not qualifiable. Beasts of somatization. they had to work for man. so psychic life. There is no other reason for the arrival of the psychic life. And nothing about this is contradictory. In the same way one rediscovers psychology. one thus discovers. Our destiny has never been separated from theirs. whose complexity can extend ad infinitum.
. The whole discovery of the psychological. etc. Beasts of demand. One will therefore bestow on animals a psychic life. conscious or unconscious. the one that permits us to send beasts. which has become used to upholding the absolute privilege of the Human over the Bestial. according to the strict law of equivalences: so much caloric energy and time = so much work power such an infraction = such an equivalent punishment so much food = optimal weight and industrial death. sociology. the sexuality of prisoners as soon as it becomes impossible to purely and simply incarcerate them.machine. and this is a sort of bitter revenge on Human Reason. selfmanagement in order to better respond to the imperative of production. animals were only demoted to the status of inhumanity as reason and humanism progressed.*2 Beasts of consumption. "normalcy" to withstand prison. the mental. not at all in order to break this delirious equation. comes from nothing but the impossibility of exploiting to death (the workers).*1 One discovers that the prisoner needs liberty. are born. just as true racism follows slavery. A logic parallel to that of racism. It would take too long to redo the genealogy of their respective statuses. without the final objective ever having changed: death. Everything has happened to them that has happened to us. just as industrially bred animals need a certain "quality of life" to die within the norm. sexuality. in rational logic. And its golden age. to respond to the terrifying universes of space and laboratories.since there is no more room for them in our culture than there is for the dead . of incarcerating to death (the detained). the psychosocial. Everyone needs a psychic life to adapt. Besides.

a clan. The structural opposition is diabolic. We take them for nothing. birds. from divine sacrifice to dog cemeteries with atmospheric music. The trajectory animals have followed. it divides and confronts distinct identities: such is the division of the Human. And the status of domestication. and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them. is symbolic: it abolishes the positions in a reversible enchainment .dogs. but only of our affection and social charity.in this sense. must not be confused with the status of the domestic pet . to the inhuman. cats. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality. as opposed to an experimental dissection. we no longer punish them. Men qualify only by their affiliation to the animal: the Bororos "are" macaws. but it is simply that we have domesticated them. It is in proportion to being relegated to irresponsibility. this signifies that Bororos and macaws are part of a cycle. as a god. and we are proud of it. we who are filled with horror at this practice. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. a divine or sacrificial nobility that all mythologies recount. in the same way that the Canaque say the dead walk among the living. It is proportional to this disdain. hamsters. worse: that we have made of them a racially inferior world. any of the distinctive oppositions upon which we live. which presupposes land. One only has to look at the status of animals in peasant society. until our era. the racist commiseration. Only the animal is worth being sacrificed. all packed together in the affection of their master. in which we ridiculously cloak animals to the point of rendering them sentimental themselves. This is not of the prelogical or psychoanalytic order . from sacred defiance to ecological sentimentality. Even domestication is still a symbolic relation.nor of the mental order of classification.Once animals had a more sacred. which throws beasts into the Inhuman . animals have always had. and for a long time the animal order has been the order of reference. and that the figure of the cycle excludes any division of species.the cycle. was in this way much closer to them than we are. to which Levi-Strauss reduced the animal effigy (even if it is still fabulous that animals served as a language. which condemned and punished them in due form. We no longer sacrifice them. just as the child does in direct proportion to being relegated to a status of innocence and childishness. a system of parentage of which the animals are a part. our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. the Bororos "are" macaws.it once again describes an unexpected reciprocity between the two. but only of experimentation and extermination like meat from the butchery. speaks loudly enough of the vulgarization of the status of man himself . (Does Deleuze envision something like that in his becoming-animal and when he says "Be the rose panther!"?) Whatever it may be. no longer worthy of punishment and of death. Those who used to sacrifice animals did not take them for beasts. It is the reabsorption of all violence in regard to them that today forms the monstrosity of
. this was also part of their divinity)-no. according to a degraded order. no longer even worthy of our justice. Even murder by hunting is still a symbolic relation. And even the Middle Ages. that the animal becomes worthy of the human ritual of affection and protection. as opposed to industrial breeding. There is not even a reign of the "human" in primitive societies.the only type of animals that are left to us outside reserves and breeding stations . more divine character than men. In particular. itself. the sacrifice of man only comes afterward.

of the radical interrogation to which. the progression that the beast followed is not different form that of madness and childhood. now intelligible under the auspices of a certain discourse: psychic life. as one has made the insane. if it still seems charged with the potential of the rupture of madness. The violence of sacrifice. in mythology. The mad were the ones who forced us to the hypothesis of the unconscious. Making animals speak. which will make room for the terrors of the nonsensical. the dragon. and that is a form of alliance. This is even deluded in regard to animals. children. this possibility of the metamorphosis of one reign into another. which is one of "intimacy" (Bataille). The original monstrosity of the beast. because it is what enables madness to be annexed to a reason more universal than classical reason. like the dead. from the very heart of their exclusion. the human and the bestial. culture were born. and so many others. which they have caused to weigh on men since the rupture in their alliance with men. the cultural hero annihilated the beast. the monster . they lent importance). a culture dead from having purged itself of all real monstrosity and from having broken its pact with it (which was expressed in the film by the primitive gift of the woman). through seduction. Because if. of sex or negritude. but never negative. Formerly. once mute. reversible violence that makes it so that all of society finally aligns itself on the axioms of madness. in return. sex (Foucault) speak. have followed this uninterrupted process of annexation through extermination. but we are the ones in return who have trapped them there. The mad. one has found the grid on which to
. The convergence of processes of civilization is astounding. A logic of exclusion. today. The challenge of madness has historically been met by the hypothesis of the unconscious. it must be said. Animals. has been succeeded by the sentimental or experimental violence that is one of distance. except in a symbolic and ritual mode). men. drive. the Unconscious seems to turn against Reason and to bring to it a radical subversion. Monstrosity has changed in meaning. object of exchange also and of metaphor.this monstrosity. monstrous seduction of one order by the other. in sacrifice. Kong dies for having renewed. of discrimination and necessarily. which consists of liquidation. all humanity has gone over to the side of captive bestiality. then of making the extinct species speak. whose principle of uncertainty. it is the beast King Kong who comes to sack our industrial metropolises. etc. who comes to liberate us from our culture.beasts. has been exchanged for a spectacular monstrosity: that of King Kong wrenched from his jungle and transformed into a music-hall star. initially. of reclusion. and to the respective seduction of man and of beast. and even in our dreams and our phantasms . The Unconscious is this logistical mechanism that permits us to think madness (and more generally all strange and anomalous formations) in a system of meaning opened to nonmeaning. repression. object of terror and fascination. of making them present the confession of their disappearance. today are heard by everyone. of childhood. this incestuous promiscuity between beasts and men (though one that is never realized. one that is secretly resolved in the living culture of men. later it turns against madness. a logic of reversion. In the end. always ambivalent. and of inferior races (purged. The profound seduction of the film comes from this inversion of meaning: all inhumanity has gone over to the side of men.and from the spilt blood plants. of sexuality. in the heraldic bestiary. resides in the fact that they do not speak. rich in every threat and every metamorphosis.

and to the libido . "difference. In all this .anatomical. and with all means. if formerly the privilege of Man was founded on the monopoly of consciousness.the mad take revenge in some way. behind which their silence analyzes us. some more innocent than others. nothing speaks to us. guinea pig.animals maintain a compulsory discourse. and for this reason they seem to retreat far from us. but what is essential is that Reason save face. Levi-Strauss pointed out that their mental structures were the same as ours. They spoke the moral discourse of man in fables. Certainly. physiological. Refusing reason to madmen leads sooner or later to dismantling the bases of this reason . It is not the ecological problem of their survival that is important. allegory (without forgetting their alimentary "use value") . the symbolic (confused with language) is. as a model for the absolute deterritorialization of desire in Deleuze's "becoming-animal" (paradoxical: to take the animal as a model of deterritorialization when he is the territorial being par excellence). do not speak. One never escapes the reversion that follows any kind of exclusion.all of our codes functioned well. as a phantasmatic register for the unconscious and. they are no longer beasts. but beneath the word of the day. in a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse. behind the horizon of truth.metaphor.collect their once absurd and indecipherable messages. nor the dead. one listens to them. as an energetic and ecological model.not through some sort of "liberation" of their speech. just as they govern and distinguish us today. one buries them beneath speech. behind all that. nor children. as a mechanical and formal model in bionics. let us not be misled by this. only they remain mute. one seeks them out. "different" speech certainly. and they responded to them. one makes them speak. today it is
. their silence weighs more and more heavily on our organization of meaning. Refusing animals the unconscious. Nowhere do they really speak. It is their way of sending the Human back to his circular codes. and fundamentally we know nothing of them. model. Certainly. One had buried them under silence. nor savages. and that everything escape silence.message in laboratories. sooner or later (in a sort of disconnection subsequent to that of madness and of the unconscious) to put in question once again the validity of these concepts. They supported structural discourse in the theory of totemism. the sharing of meaning. neoimperialism of difference. one can hope. What is essential is that nothing escape the empire of meaning. but still and always that of their silence. it is the same order that is advancing. to the adult universe they are no longer those simultaneously strange and insignificant beings children signify. but because adult reason has given itself the most subtle means to avert the threat of their silence. neither the mad. Because. In a universe of increasing speech. lastly. because they only furnish the responses one asks for. the animals. repression. They. psychoanalysis rallied them to Oedipus. genetic . they have become significant . Every day they deliver their "objective" . In a world bent on doing nothing but making one speak. They served in turns as metaphors for virtue and vice." as formerly one did beneath the unity of Reason. The imperialism of reason. The primitives also are heard. But it is what makes us intimate with them. of the constraint to confess and to speak. Children speak.

The unconscious is a "buried. even on the road to disappearance. Nothing more errant. nor need. which alone gives meaning to the dream by inscribing it in the symbolic order.no. of an environmental bubble where the whole system of needs is summed up. but just the opposite of seeing in what way they put in question this very hypothesis of the unconscious. the notion of territory is also opposed in some way to that of the unconscious.animals are the nostalgia for it. but yet they are for us the image of metamorphosis. and to what other hypothesis they force us. Such is the meaning. the ghosts of animals and the natural elements would come to rub against the shadow of men who survived the political economy . cycle of women and ritual . cycle of goods and wealth. The unconscious is the site of the indefinite repetition of subjective repression and fantasies. nor unconscious. or the non-meaning of their silence. since all is metamorphosed. Animals have no unconscious. of metamorphosis and of territory. under the sign of a general ecology where in a sort of planetary niche. of the clan or of the species . Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory. nor structure (be it "cultural" and "behavioral"). *3 But one must push aside all the countermeanings on this notion of territory. hopelessly replayed . nor repression. and they lack language.the unconscious is the individual structure of mourning in which this loss is incessantly. a sort of organic right to private property of the individual. The question that they raise for us would thus be this one: don't we live now and already. Neither instinct. Without a doubt.in fact animals are not intelligible to us either under the regime of consciousness or under that of the unconscious. The territory is the site of a completed cycle of parentage and exchanges . this is well known. and indefinitely subdivided structure." repressed. For if to us they are and will remain unintelligible. The territory is open and circumscribed. they dream.total reversibility . cycle of parentage and the species. We can fantasize about them. of all possible metamorphoses.without a subject. it is not a question of forcing them to it. It is not at all the enlarged relation of a subject or of a group to its own space. Such was the silence of madmen that it forced us to the hypothesis of the unconscious such is the resistance of animals that it forces us to change hypotheses. And if we live in this way.but no one knows death there. project our fantasies on them and think we are sharing this mise-en-scéne.nor this sort of vital function.founded on the monopoly of the unconscious. Therefore. with what this term implies for us about liberty and appropriation.*4 A territory is also not a space. Animals have no unconscious. which is only the enlarged dimension of the Platonic cave. but without exception: animal and vegetal cycle. our profound understanding with beasts. nor death. more nomadic in appearance than animals. Nothing seems more fixed in the perpetuation of the species than animals. opposite in appearance. Neither subject. and yet their law is that of the territory.there is no subject and everything is exchanged. At once territories and metamorphoses have been taken from them . is placed under the conjugated sign. but this is a conjecture of a bioelectrical order. The obligations are absolute therein . because they have a territory. But this is comfortable for us . yet we live in some kind of understanding with them. beyond the
.such is the phantasm of psychology and of sociology extended to all of ecology . since nothing stops the enchainment of forms.

four hundred men and one hundred women experiment with the sweetest penitentiary in the world. because they dream of total deterritorialization where the system never imposes anything but what is relative: the demand of "liberty" is never anything but going further than the system. Nature. that of the same form always more decoded.) and the imaginary savagery one places in opposition to it: they are both "deterritorialized" and in each other's image. A child was born there last June and there were only three escapes in two years. Couples are able to be alone in the empty rooms. of all culture maybe. but for the most part they have returned of their own accord. of which this nature is the equivalent mirror." and in the use of the word consommation in the following phrase. were never deterritorialized. animality. etc." one sees this in current theories. a representation of nature and of beasts as savagery. That animals wander is a myth. Now. but in the same direction. In French. more decentered. without limits or territories. . Thus. of obligation and ritual defiance rather than of liberty. symbolic mode. 2. free. Each prisoner possesses the only key to his individual room. * NOTES * 1. etc. do not even express a dream the opposite of capital. elles sont sommees de repondre a l'interrogatoire de la science. ." today "of realizing all his desires" because modern Rousseauism has taken the form of the indeterminacy of drive. never existed. of the territorial cycle rather than of . The men and women take their meals together and get together outside of group therapy sessions. they directly translate the progress or the ravages of this culture. of the wandering of desire and of the nomadism of infinitude . but absolutely according to the same movement. Baudrillard plays with the word somme in the phrase that follows: "Betes de sommation. They are silent. ) the very schema of deterritorialization that is that of the economic system and of capital as ideal savagery.. .but it is the same mystique of unleashed. liberty. rhizome . Moreover. of metamorphosis rather than energy. repressive. and the current representation of the unconscious and of desire as erratic and nomadic belongs to the same "order. increases at the same rate as civilized abstraction. Liberty is nowhere but in capital. desire. A whole liberatory phantasmagoria is drawn in opposition to the constraints of modern society. in Texas. according to this brute. they even anticipate it.
. desire. where each wanders at will. noncoded forces with no finality other than their own eruption. of the accumulation of energy. as the freedom to "fulfill all needs. beyond the effects of the conscious and unconscious. don't we dream of implosion rather than of explosion. 3. virgin nature." which simultaneously envelops our real and our imaginary. of indefinite cycling and reversion over a finite space? And beyond the ideal schema that is that of our culture.-TRANS. the radicality of "desire. betes de somme means beasts of burden. . There is thus an exact correlation between the social legislation of value (urban. But the animals do not ask questions. and of the final liberation. Animals have never wandered. We project (nature. it is what deepens it. To this day. "freer. not at all antagonistically. except in the imaginary of the dominant order. it is what produced it. industrial.effects of the linearity and the accumulation of reason. thirty-five prisoners have escaped.

either in the hypothalamus or elsewhere. even of an animal.. the individual bubble has shrunk considerably. which are spaces of insurmountable reciprocity. The bubble. internal and external!
. sociology. the territory thus represent the morsel of space in immediate contact with the organism.. functional. with the promiscuity that characterizes the great modern cities... which today is the vulgate common to economics. As if the stake of a group or of a man... marked. Thus.Neither the beasts nor the savages know "nature" in our way: they only know territories.. Henri Laborit refuses the interpretation of territory in terms of instinct or private property: "One has never brought forth as evidence. It is not useful to appeal to a particular instinct" .: "The territory thus becomes the space necessary to the realization of the act of bestowing.. With the growing interdependence of human individuals. homeostatic conception." Spatial. psychology. No territorial center seems to exist.. the one in which it 'opens' its thermodynamic exchanges in order to maintain its own structure. were the equilibrium of his bubble and the homeostasis of his exchanges..but it is useful to do so in order to better return it to a functionality of needs extended to include cultural behaviors. limited. either a cellular group or neural pathways that are differentiated in relation to the notion of territory. the vital space. 4. etc.

what else? It is through the subtraction of the remainder that reality is founded and gathers strength. it is unstable and without definition. It is that in both cases the line of structural demarcation. or if it is not the social itself that is the remainder.the remainder disappearing from the assigned location to resurface inside out. . the powerful moment. Who can say if the remainder of the social is the residue of the nonsocialized. Thus the remainder refers to much more than a clear division in two localized terms. it is that meaning (most literally: the possibility of going from one point to another according to a vector determined by the respective position of the terms) no longer exists. of what else? Of a process. when one has added everything up. in what it was the remainder of. in this structure that is not one. It is anonymous. This is false. The equation of everything and nothing. the privileged element in this strangely asymmetrical opposition. the gigantic waste product. more real than the real. the crazy/the normal. an always imminent structure of reversion. or this mise-en-abyme: the masculine is not the feminine of the feminine. the operation and the remainder are not distinctive oppositions. what is on the other side of the remainder exists. etc. the normal is not the crazy of the crazy. circumscription. and conversely . nothing is left. the entire sum turns to the remainder
. nor its own place: it is what partition. to a turning and reversible structure. etc. When a system has absorbed everything. But this marked term has no name. but only the negative gives it the force of reality. it is even the marked term. what else? What is strange is precisely that there is no opposing term in a binary opposition: one can say the right/the left. Perhaps only in the mirror can the question be posed: which. the right is not the left of the left.THE REMAINDER When everything is taken away. the line of the sharing of meaning. The residue can be completely at the level of the real. But this remainder never has an autonomous reality.. "The sum and the remainder. is the reflection of the other? In this sense one can speak of the remainder as a mirror. In a strict sense." the addition and the remainder. The same is true of the social. has become a wavering one. etc. is totally false. the majority/the minority.but the remainder/ ? Nothing on the other side of the slash. it cannot be defined except as the remainder of the remainder.the real disappearing to make room for an image. the subtraction of the remainder. It is not that there is no remainder. the same/the other. which even if it were to completely disappear and had no name except the social would nevertheless only be its remainder... In no other structure can one create this reversion.. the real or the image. There is no longer a respective position . or of the mirror of the remainder. Positive.. in which one never knows which is the remainder of the other. And yet. exclusion designate. when nothing remains..

of the return of the remainder as surplus of meaning. at the remainder. because it is reversible and is exchanged for itself. of the return of the repressed as a powerful moment. the same ambiguity. But what happens when everything is sponged up. it itself becomes residual. appear . Privilege of all the remainders. Any discussion on this theme unleashes the same language games. They are themselves reversible. the feminine. which by itself traverses the whole cycle. Today. etc. the disappearance of the fatidic and structural slash that isolated the rest of ??? and that now permits each term to be the remainder of the other term characterizes a phase of reversibility during which there is "virtually" no more remainder. a phase when everything becomes a remainder and a residual.and becomes the remainder. then.said. Witness the "Society" column of Le Monde. etc. which was nothing but its insignificant remainder. dreams. like Peter Schlemihl after his shadow?*l The remainder is obscene. It is no longer a political economy of production that directs us.). Inversely. after its own double. But this is still nothing but a sort of inversion of the structure. as only the lack of distinction between masculine and feminine. Designated as "residual" at the horizon of the social. and the same obscenity as do discussions of sex or death. women. the crazy.everything that has not been socialized. End of a certain logic of distinctive oppositions. between life and death." the social designates itself as a remainder. in all domains. As the social in its progression eliminates all the residue. the two others amounting to this as to the very figure of reversibility. and sex and death are eminently reversible figures. It is obscene and makes one laugh. Today. the lack of distinction between life and death makes one laugh. deeply laugh. they enter its jurisdiction in this way and are destined to find their place in an enlarged sociality. which does not even have an opposing term. It is because the stake is always reversible between masculine and feminine. but an economic politics of reproduction. Pockets to be reabsorbed. In designating residual categories as "Society. Psychoanalysis itself is the first great theorization of residues (lapses. etc. the remainder has become the weighty term. the dynamic is reversed. segments that the "social" isolates as it grows. and runs infinitely after its own slash. in which the weak term played the role of the residual term. "social" cases analogous to pathological cases. and it is the whole social system that becomes residue. and perhaps the only one. It is on the remainder that a new intelligibility is founded. Sex and death are the great themes recognized for unleashing ambivalence and laughter. All normality sees itself today in the light of madness. For why does one laugh? One only laughs at the reversibility of things. But the remainder is the third. in which paradoxically. How much more. of the not . only immigrants. It is for this remainder that the social machine is recharged and finds new energy. that one laughs at sex and death. of recycling-ecology and pollution-a political economy of the remainder. The two propositions are simultaneously "true" and are not mutually exclusive. when everything is socialized? Then the machine stops. the marginal. as excess (but
. of excrement and waste in art. delinquents. everything is inverted. The impossibility of determining what is the remainder of the other characterizes the phase of simulation and the death throes of distinctive systems. Another aspect as surprising as the absence of an opposing term: the remainder makes you laugh.

When repression reaches a point of critical saturation where its presence is put in question. The secret of all the "liberations" that play on the hidden energies on the other side of the slash. Birth is residual if it is not symbolically revisited through initiation. economized. It is on the stockpile of repressed affects and representations that our new alliance is based. due to the fact that the remainder is everywhere. in the linear infinity of production. compensates for the energy and value that used to be accomplished in the cycle of alliance. in the sense that it is a rupture of alliance. It is not when one has taken everything away that nothing is left. The social itself is residual once it becomes a production of "social relations. and the accumulation of remainders. of energy. below the line of eternity (this stockpile of time that itself is also. Sexuality is residual once it becomes the production of sexual relations.
. Value is residual if it is not reabsorbed and volitalized in the cycle of exchanges. and the problem of the squandering of excess in Bataille is not different from that of the reabsorption of remainders in a political economy of calculation and penury. as with any stockpile. All accumulation is nothing but a remainder. a rupture of alliances). spent. comes to us from repression. what traverses a cycle is completely realized. nothing is anymore. produced: it is the concept of energy itself that will be volatilized of its own accord. Death is residual if it is not resolved in mourning. only the philosophies are different)." All of the real is residual. it annuls itself as such. and by playing with the slash. then energy will no longer be available to be liberated. everything that is below the line of the infinite. all of that is nothing but the remainder. Now. and everything that is residual is destined to repeat itself indefinitely in phantasms.excess is not formally different from the remainder. Accumulation is nothing but the remainder. But when everything is repressed. and of what remains of it. and repression is nothing but its inverse and asymmetrical form. but that of an instability in every structure and every opposition that makes it so that there is no longer even a remainder. Now we are faced with a much more original situation: not that of the pure and simple inversion and promotion of remainders. We are not far from this absolute point of repression where the stockpiles are themselves undone. whereas in the dimension of the infinite. The whole imaginary of the stockpile. of a higher order of meaning starting with the remainder. where the stockpiles of phantasms collapse. and in the linear infinity of accumulation and calculation. nothing is left when things are unceasingly shifted and addition itself no longer has any meaning. in the collective celebration of mourning. rather.

the restitution and the conservation of remainders." that creates the charm.Today the remainder. it is itself nothing but a remainder. of what profoundly gives meaning to the subject. like the image in the mirror (in The Student from Prague). But they are also. will produce a new repression. of essence. of repression and the unconscious. the energies left us. What is surprising in this. thanks to which one has managed to enclose everything in an entropic and catastrophic equation. excrement. this incessant defeat of meaning before what remains of it. the beauty. of Being. * NOTE * 1. just like hair. is a remainder par excellence.see also The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen). All desire.classic sequence of fantastic tales . the Man Who Lost His Shadow. all libidinal energy. One must push at maximal repression in order to exterminate its concept. once the last indigenous person has been analyzed (by the last ethnologist). of breath. something that can "fall" from the body. And it is this reversion of the shadow onto the body. But nothing in the symbolic order permits betting on the primacy of one or the other (of the body or the shadow). that represses it and "produces" it. and the disquieting strangeness of these stories. or nail clippings to which it "is" compared in all archaic magic. under the rubric of the insignificant. Without an image or without a shadow. is not accidental." then one will realize that this gigantic spiral of energy and production. by the terms of the essential. All new freed or spent energy will leave a new remainder. Since the shadow. and it will suddenly be resolved in all its effects. this fallout of the essential. There is no more reality: it is the shadow that has carried all reality away with it (thus in The Student from Prague. one knows. the fallout of its own fallout. the body becomes a transparent nothing. is the crucial problem of humanity. given that energy itself is not conceived except in the movement that stockpiles and liberates it. the image broken by the mirror brings with it the immediate death of the hero . The allusion to Peter Schlemihl.
. once the ultimate commodity has been produced by the last "work force. "metaphors" of the soul. that all this is in effect nothing but a metaphysics of the remainder. Thus the body can be nothing but the waste product of its own residue. It is insoluble in and of itself. that is to say in the figure of the remainder and its double? One must push at the insane consumption of energy in order to exterminate its concept. Only the order said to be real permits privileging the body as reference. It is the diaphanous substance that remains once the shadow is gone. Once the last liter of energy has been consumed (by the last ecologist). be they nail clippings or the "objet petit a.

because it wants power. why this provocative politics. after knowledge. lacking cultural substance or an end purpose of knowledge. that the system itself. certainly. or by other means. justice at the university .has dispossessed itself. offensive irruption is impossible. in any case it is ready to award them to everybody. It is the Left that secrets and desperately reproduces power.THE SPIRALING CADAVER The university is in ruins: nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and employment. This fiction still dreams of a permanency and democracy of knowledge. from puritan morality to petit bourgeois culture. the vertigo of nonknowledge (that is to say at once the absurdity and the impossibility of accumulating value in the order of knowledge) turns like an absolute weapon against power itself. and therefore the Left believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it. In a now uncertain institution. Only what precipitates rotting.everything that is disappearing. but also in its irreversible impulse. The system puts an end one by one to all its axioms. from the army to national grandeur. has liquidated. must be conserved.the explosive contradiction of knowledge and power (or the revelation of their collusion. has meaning. in order to dismantle it according to the same vertiginous scenario of dispossession. at the same time. without a power structure (except for an archaic feudalism that turns a simulacrum of a machine whose destiny escapes it and whose survival is as artificial as that of barracks and theaters). without knowledge content. Why sociologists? marked this shift: the impasse of knowledge. which comes to the same thing) in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age. Whence the paradoxical but necessary inversion of all the terms of political analysis. as its therapy. A strike has exactly the opposite effect. Whence the impossibility of the return of the fires of 1968: of the return of putting in question knowledge versus power itself . This is the May 1968 effect. simulacral side of dying games of knowledge and power. has become ungraspable . if not in order to
. Power (or what takes its place) no longer believes in the university. This ideal is substituted for the operation of the university as its critical alternative. it therefore has only to select . there is no longer even any power: it is also in ruins. to all its institutions. has taken off.it will find its elite elsewhere. Besides. Today it cannot be achieved since power itself. everywhere today the Left plays this role: it is the justice of the Left that reinjects an idea of justice. Diplomas are worthless: why would it refuse to award them. and that no longer has meaning. which is losing all conscience of its legitimacy and renounces functioning almost of its own volition. in its atrocity. and realizes one by one all the objectives of the historical and revolutionary Left that sees itself constrained to revive the wheels of capital in order to lay seige to them one day: from private property to the small business. It regenerates the ideal of a possible university: the fiction of an ascension on everyone's part to a culture that is unlocatable. the necessity of logic and social morals into a rotten apparatus that is coming undone. through symbolic (rather than political) contagion in the whole institutional and social order. Strictly speaking. by accentuating the parodic. and.

just as black people in Watts and in Detroit brandished the ruins of their neighborhoods to which they had themselves set fire. behind which grows the absent. power has been lost. the challenge of a deterritorialization even more intense than the one that came from the system. in an ideal mode).to that challenge. 1968 is dead. work. of an offensive reversion. but to brandish its cadaver in the face of the others. where death would finally make its ravages. That is what the events of May 1968 produced. we have mourned Nanterre for seven years. more broadly. therefore subversive for us). the rotting of power to come up against . which the strike tries desperately to avert. except by its own dissolution in return (only for a moment maybe. of which we are the minuscule terminals. which was only the long-term operation of the system itself: the liquidation of culture and of knowledge.not the crisis of the university. on the level of
. but the mechanical illusion of power still rules the social order. but the death of the university . a delay that is not even the possible site of a subversion. and not to dream of resurrection. But for this to be the case it is necessary to start with this very rotting. They were not there to save the Sorbonne. power has not been able to respond. the dead culture whose challenge they were launching at power. the rotting of knowledge to come up against power . on top of it all. a contagious model of the disaffection of a whole social structure. on an already dead and rotting referential? By rotting. this death desired in the end . The barricades of 10 May seemed defensive and to be defending a territory: the Latin Quarter. that all student conflicts (as is the case. through mockery and defiance. We know it. Power is being lost. on the contrary.the ruins themselves are defunct. it was the dead university. and by summoning power to respond to this total derailment of the institution of knowledge. that is not a challenge. in complicity with the system. far from wishing to save the furniture (revive the lost object. to this total lack of a need to gather in a given place. What can one brandish today? No longer even the ruins of knowledge. only in transforming the university into a slow death. Attacking representation no longer has much meaning either.no longer discovering this fabulous energy on the same level at all. into violent death. But this is not true: behind this facade. diplomas. but we saw it). repeatable only as a phantasm of mourning.against what precisely? There lies the problem. of culture . the students.a transformation into immediate sacrifice. but succeeds. old boutique. immediate death of the institution. All around us there are nothing but dummies of power. It is necessary to transform this rotting into a violent process. for the same reason. terror of control. the university can still do a lot of damage (rotting is a symbolic mechanism not political but symbolic.crystallize energies on a fictive stake (selection. etc. illegible. retorted by confronting power with the challenge of the total. through a multiplied simulation that would offer the ritual of the death of the university as a model of decomposition to the whole of society. One senses quite clearly. but on the superior spiral: causing nonpower. the terror of a definitive code. and their own eventual death at the same time .). It is perhaps insoluble. At a less advanced point in the process of the liquefaction of the university and of culture. it is the game of the system. What would be the equivalent in symbolic violence (that is to say beyond the political) would be the same operation that caused nonknowledge.

Capital.without hope. We are simulators. politics included. out of despair. to occupy the forefront of the stage. hope is a weak value. where only the wind watches over the sand. where all that is accumulated is deaccumulated at the same time.liquidating without shame the law of profit. We will live in this world. Surrounded by the simulacrum of value and by the phantom of capital and of power.only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains. is irresponsible. to us. that the death of capital has made of us . power without origin. and salvageable phantasm of power has disappeared. in which value buries value . which is at once that of the death throes and the apogee of capital. Yet it is there that one must fight. Because one must not refuse the intense fascination that emanates from this liquefaction of all power. and finding at the end of its process the profound immorality (but also the seduction) of primitive rituals of destruction. the delegation of power are no longer anything but phantom vicissitudes that yet still manage. It is up to us to again become the nomads of this desert. To leave it the initiative of its own death. is to leave it all the privileges of revolution. which are orthogonal and prepared for the infinite linearity of criticism and history.because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand . sacred space without pathways. where only the wind lifts the sand. if even fighting has any meaning anymore. This spectacle. violently resist. which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum. like value. against the staging by capital of its own death. ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulation. we are simulacra (not in the classical sense of "appearance"). irreversible. What can one make of all this in the political order? Very little. in which work buries work. But we also have to fight against the profound fascination exerted on us by the death throes of capital. of seduction. We are no longer in a relation toward capital of uncertain or victorious forces. of all axiology. a radiation without a light source. surpasses by far that of the commodity described by the situationists. representation itself has also turned in on itself. structures of power. we are much more disarmed and impotent than when surrounded by
. continuous as Bataille wished it. but disengaged from the mechanical illusion of value. The challenge capital directs at us in its delirium . and the whole logical universe of the political is dissolved at the same time. where from the beginning no one is represented nor representative of anything any more.the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature . Through I don't know what Mobius effect. productive finalities. we are concave mirrors radiated by the social. that is the phantasm of revolution. unrecognizable. where even the axiological. but in a political one. A universe that is still incomprehensible. Only to value is capital capable of offering a fantastic spectacle of its decomposition .global society) around the representation. We are in a relation of defiance.only the phantom of value still floats over the desert of the classical structures of capital. but in defiance and fascination. This spectacle is our essential force. of wandering and simulating animals that capital. with all the veracity of living phantoms. directive. a universe with a malefic curve that our mental coordinates. just as the phantom of religion floats over a world now long desacralized. surplus value. just as the phantom of knowledge floats over the university.leaving a virgin.the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forests . and it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will need to fight . ineluctable. without distance. of all axes of value. this very challenge must be raised to an insanely higher level. when we are really the ones in our final hours. precisely because all axiality that escapes it. and of death toward this universe that is no longer one.

only a superior ruse can stop. that of the simulacrum of its death. and thus of the stake of our own life.the law of value and of the commodity. through which it maintains us in life by having liquidated through absorption all possible negativity. Challenge or imaginary science. This supreme ruse of the system. since the system has revealed itself capable of integrating its own death and since we are relieved of the responsibility for this death. only a pataphysics of simulacra can can remove us from the system's strategy of simulation and the impasse of death in which it imprisons us.
.

Even the domestic squabbles between teachers and students. the true desperation of nonwork. lies order -Brecht Panic on the part of university administrators at the idea that diplomas will be awarded without a "real"-work counterpart.operational values in the void . or by a form of aggression (the teacher called on to give the course. according to its very form. a bit like floating capital or Eurodollars. but their heart isn't in it . but it wants that . and the ghostly presence of the phantom value will only be greater. their raison d'être in it. or treated as the automatic distributor) or by rancor. of nonknowledge. with pedagogical incest that strives to substitute itself for the lost exchange of work and knowledge).is hard to bear.alibi. its exchange value. But nothing works.and we were the ones who inaugurated it. into giving diplomas to everybody. it is that of seeing value become dissociated from its contents and begin to function alone. but that is unimportant: their circulation alone is enough to create a social horizon of value. and who invest their lived experience. The exchange of signs (of knowledge. Subversion? Not at all. Because current generations still dream of reading. The students' distress at having diplomas conferred on them for no work complements and is equal to that of the teachers. etc. Also it must be complicated by either a benefit . after 1968. The system does not want any more diplomas.) will proliferate and continue to circulate. even when its reference point (its use value. It is so for those who still think that a real process of work takes place in the university. Terror of value without equivalence. we were the promoters of the advanced form. lies disorder Where in the desired place there is nothing.*l It is also why we were trapped. Once again.which empties the vicissitudes of knowledge and selection of content .as a whole.VALUE'S LAST TANGO Where nothing is in its place. completely devalorized in the end. This is why the strike no longer means anything. the academic "work force" that the university recoops) is lost. they will spiral without referential criteria. of competing. In this sense the university remains the site of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value. with the illusion of doing the opposite. which today make up a great
. presence. No-risk insurance on the diploma . a simulacrum of work exchanged against a simulacrum of a diploma. It is more secret and more insidious than the traditional anguish of failure or of receiving worthless diplomas. a doubled simulacrum of a psychodrama (that of a demand hot with shame. so that at least something will still take place that resembles a "real" relation. The values of the university (diplomas. their neuroses. This situation only appears to be new. between "teachers" and "taught" has for some time been nothing but a doubled collusion of bitterness and indifference (the indifference of signs that brings with it the disaffection of social and human relations). of the pure form of value: diplomas without work. of learning. the ascetic cultural mentality has run body and possessions together. without an equivalence in knowledge. of culture) in the university. This panic is not that of political subversion. and those who have lived there for the past few years are familiar with this strange work. we trapped ourselves. oedipal exchange.

part of their exchanges, are nothing but the recollection of, and a kind of nostalgia for a violence or a complicity that heretofore made them enemies or united them around a stake of knowledge or a political stake. The "hard law of value," the "law set in stone" - when it abandons us, what sadness, what panic! This is why there are still good days left to fascist and authoritarian methods, because they revive something of the violence necessary to life - whether suffered or inflicted. The violence of ritual, the violence of work, the violence of knowledge, the violence of blood, the violence of power and of the political is good! It is clear, luminous, the relations of force, contradictions, exploitation, repression! This is lacking today, and the need for it makes itself felt. The teacher's reinvestment of his power through "free speech," the self-management of the group and other modern nonsense - it is still all a game, for example, in the university (but the entire political sphere is articulated in the same way). No one is fooled. Simply in order to escape profound disillusionment, to escape the catastrophe brought on by the loss of roles, statutes, responsibilities, and the incredible demagoguery that is deployed through them, it is necessary to recreate the professor either as a mannequin of power and knowledge, or to invest him with a modicum of legitimacy derived from the ultra-Left - if not the situation is intolerable for everyone. It is based on this compromise - artificial figuration of the teacher, equivocal complicity on the part of the student - it is based on this phantom scenario of pedagogy that things continue and this time can last indefinitely. Because there is an end to value and to work, there is none to the simulacrum of value and of work. The universe of simulation is transreal and transfmite: no test of reality will come to put an end to it except the total collapse and slippage of the terrain, which remains our most foolish hope. * Note * 1. Moreover, contemporary strikes naturally take on the same qualities as work: the same suspension, the same weight, the same absence of objectives, the same allergy to decisions, the same turning round of power, the same mourning of energy, the same undefined circularity in todays strike as in yesterday's work, the same situation in the counterinstitution as in the institution: the contagion grows, the circle is closed - after that it will be necessary to emerge elsewhere. Or, rather, the opposite: take this impasse itself as the basic situation, turn the indecision and the absence of an objective into an offensive situation, a strategy. In searching at any price to wrench oneself from this mortal situation, from this mental anorexia of the university, the students do nothing but breathe energy again into an institution long since in a coma; it is forced survival, it is the medicine of desperation that is practiced today on both institutions and individuals, and that everywhere is the sign of the same incapacity to confront death. "One must push what is collapsing," said Nietzsche.

ON NIHILISM Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a Weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death. Today's nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it. When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so - the great nihilist before the Eternal and the cadaver of the Eternal. But before the simulated transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own. The universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation, into the malefic, not even malefic, indifferent, sphere of deterrence: in a bizarre fashion, nihilism has been entirely realized no longer through destruction, but through simulation and deterrence. From the active, violent phantasm, from the phantasm of the myth and the stage that it also was, historically, it has passed into the transparent, falsely transparent, operation of things. What then remains of a possible nihilism in theory? What new scene can unfold, where nothing and death could be replayed as a challenge, as a stake? We are in a new, and without a doubt insoluble, position in relation to prior forms of nihilism: Romanticism is its first great manifestation: it, along with the Enlightenment's Revolution, corresponds to the destruction of the order of appearances. Surrealism, dada, the absurd, and political nihilism are the second great manifestation, which corresponds to the destruction of the order of meaning. The first is still an aesthetic form of nihilism (dandyism), the second, a political, historical, and metaphysical form (terrorism). These two forms no longer concern us except in part, or not at all. The nihilism of transparency is no longer either aesthetic or political, no longer borrows from either the extermination of appearances, nor from extinguishing the embers of meaning, nor from the last nuances of an apocalypse. There is no longer an apocalypse (only aleatory terrorism still tries to reflect it, but it is certainly no longer political, and it only has one mode of manifestation left that is at the same time a mode of disappearance: the media now the media are not a stage where something is played, they are a strip, a track, a perforated map of which we are no longer even spectators: receivers). The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don't think so - all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to

dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency. I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history. I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning. The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage. There is no therapy of meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized process of indifferentiation. The stage of analysis itself has become uncertain, aleatory: theories float (in fact, nihilism is impossible, because it is still a desperate but determined theory, an imaginary of the end, a weltanschauung of catastrophe).*1 Analysis is itself perhaps the decisive element of the immense process of the freezing over of meaning. The surplus of meaning that theories bring, their competition at the level of meaning is completely secondary in relation to their coalition in the glacial and four-tiered operation of dissection and transparency. One must be conscious that, no matter how the analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows. Implosion of meaning in the media. Implosion of the social in the masses. Infinite growth of the masses as a function of the acceleration of the system. Energetic impasse. Point of inertia. A destiny of inertia for a saturated world. The phenomena of inertia are accelerating (if one can say that). The arrested forms proliferate, and growth is immobilized in excrescence. Such is also the secret of the hypertelie, of what goes further than its own end. It would be our own mode of destroying finalities: going further, too far in the same direction - destruction of meaning through simulation, hypersimulation, hypertelie. Denying its own end through hyperfinality (the crustacean, the statues of Easter Island) is this not also the obscene secret of cancer? Revenge of excrescence on growth, revenge of speed on inertia. The masses themselves are caught up in a gigantic process of inertia through

and indifferent form. It is this melancholia of systems that today takes the upper hand through the ironically transparent forms that surround us. It is simply disappearance. one that is incurable and beyond any dialectic. This. And we are all melancholic.acceleration. mythic denial. of programming and information. and without a doubt the most subtle dialectic is nostalgic to begin with. Everywhere. with the seductive and nostalgic. then I am a nihilist. It is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder. of radicality. of the social. Against this hegemony of the system. Disappearance. melancholia is the fundamental tonality of functional systems. dramatic anticipation. But more deeply. and no longer by the mode of production. aphanisis. then I am a nihilist. true and false. It is no longer nihilism either. which in some sense aims at normalizing everything through destruction. To tell the truth. It is no longer even disenchantment. only terrorism can do. of the individual).*2 No. It is this melancholia that is becoming our fundamental passion. one can exalt the ruses of desire. tonality of disenchantment. Fury of Verschwindens. practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian. It is this point of inertia and what happens outside this point of inertia that today is fascinating. The trace of this radicality of the mode of disappearance is already found in Adorno and Benjamin. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight. If it is nihilistic to be obsessed by the mode of disappearance. exalt the molecular drift or even defend cooking. that of a melancholy attached to the system itself. the discreet charm of the dialectic). Because there is a nostalgia of the dialectic. Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. the pathetic of nihilism that mythical energy that is still the force of nihilism. once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. enthralling (gone. itself enchanted. implosion. of history. Once the hope of balancing good and evil. just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse. process that annihilates all growth and all surplus meaning. always. Transpolitics is the elective sphere of the mode of disappearance (of the real. parallel to a nostalgic exercise of the dialectic. They are this circuit short-circuited by a monstrous finality. Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning. If it is nihilistic to privilege this point of inertia and the analysis of this irreversibility of systems up to the point of no return. the system is too strong: hegemonic. indeed of confronting some values of the same order. It is no longer the spleen or the vague yearnings of the fin-de-siecle soul. there is no longer even pathos. of the mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. They are this excrescent. of current systems of simulation. just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and
. aleatory. of meaning. devouring. it is no longer so much a question of nihilism: in disappearance. of the stage. the passion of resentment (ressentiment). there is in Benjamin and Adorno another tonality. therefore. in the desertlike.

but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing. invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. is the image of a chain failure.) Death no longer has a stage. There is no longer a stage.. if there were still a radicality . not politically. The more hegemonic the system. nihilistic). or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. the system opposes its own. Biafra. This is where seduction begins. No longer having any imaginary. Only it mobilizes the imaginary. If being a nihilist. the boat people. that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system. The system is itself also nihilistic. neither phantasmatic nor political. Because to this active nihilism of radicality. even infinitesimal. The challenge. Two other types of figures are possible.pleasure of the master. But it is at this point that things become insoluble.. that of the system. There are cultures that have no imaginary except of their origin and have no imaginary of their end.as it would be nice to be a terrorist. to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems. this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death. either a ceremonial or a violent one. not truth. death itself shines by virtue of its absence. into indifference.. And this is the victory of the other nihilism. the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile.
. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences). of the other terrorism. the nihilism of neutralization. in the sense that it has the power to pour everything. In this system. what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment. they. including that of the terrorist. are immortal. But such a sentiment is Utopian.. Theoretical violence. * NOTES * 1. on which to represent itself. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist. to play itself out. if death. is the only resource left us. still had meaning. the Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference. There is no more hope for meaning. including what denies it. appearances. is carrying. Having no imaginary except of the end (our culture. Bologna. (The Bologna train station. on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. that is. neither of the origin nor of the end (that which is coming. There are those that are obsessed by both. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today. this radical trait of derision and of violence. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign.

TRANS.aleatory). ~ The End ~
. 2. Cf. Nietzsche's use of the word "ressentiment" throughout Thus Spoke Zaralhustra.